


Bond II: Cambiata

by LittleRedPencil



Series: Bond [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam (Voltron) Lives, Adam/Shiro (Voltron) Reunion, Altean Lance (Voltron), BAMF Allura (Voltron), Established Adam/Shiro (Voltron), F/M, Galra Keith (Voltron), M/M, Paladin Adam (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-09-01 15:50:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 285,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedPencil/pseuds/LittleRedPencil
Summary: The Kuron Project was thought to be over, ended with the destruction of the clones when Keith fought to survive on a small asteroid laboratory. But Honerva knows there's one left walking among the Earthlings as the Captain of the IGF-Atlas, and she's not above bribing the easily manipulated with offers of safety if Shiro is brought to her. The clock is ticking as she prepares to destroy the remnants of the Altean colony--and all of its inhabitants--if she doesn't get what she wants. While Adam stumbles deeper into her hands out of desperation, a recently awakened Lotor needs to figure out how he can rescue his people with no backup now that he's the galaxy's Public Enemy #1. Unaware of the dangers practically at their doorstep, the Paladins begin to unravel the secrets of their pasts, their present, and the bonds they've formed with their Lions.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Grown people swearing // some fight scenes are graphic (blood, violence; I try not to explicitly describe it but sometimes it can't be helped). Extreme moments are tagged within the text.

**_Current day_** :

It was a great stroke of luck that the Atlas had crashed on Arus, a friendly planet with a known, healthy balmera nearby. Also a boon that the Lions were up and running, because the Atlas had required no less than four Battleship Class crystals to get back to running at full efficiency. Even those four crystals didn’t give off the same amount of power as the Infinite Zero core, as Allura had come to refer to their recently stolen energy crystal.

That was a big problem. The Infinite Zero was a compressed piece of infinite mass, Allura suspected that the reason it powered the Atlas so easily was because it was actually a crystallized wormhole. A direct line into the quintessence field that drew power from it without anything needing to be refined or recharged. Basically, exactly the kind of thing she and Lotor had been trying to create in order to stop the Galra’s imperial spread in the name of gathering quintessence.

During the Last Stand Allura had felt someone—or something—using alchemy from the Atlas, tapping into the quintessence field through that crystallized wormhole and using it to fuel a shift in the ship’s shape. The balmera crystals would power the Atlas as a warship, but they would not be enough to fuel any further change to its form.

Not that it mattered, the bayard port the Atlas had created for itself would undoubtedly work only for Shiro, via his prosthetic arm. The arm that was currently sitting on the work table in front of her.

It had been two quintants since the trap set for the Atlas. Allura and Pidge had been forced to turn back several vargas into their trip, heading back to Earth in order to wormhole to Arus and meet up with everyone. It had been another twelve vargas to harvest and install the crystals and another two to get everything up and running and everyone back onto the ship. It was now in its berth at the Garrison, having repairs done to both the outer hull and the internal damage.

Lance had known how to hit them where it hurt. It was a rude awakening for everyone, except maybe Keith. He seemed to be the only one who wasn’t surprised by the full extent of the carnage.

There was a soft knock at the door of her lab, and Veronica entered without waiting to be told. She was carrying a tray from the mess hall, her tired hands trembling slightly from trying to balance the weight. Allura didn’t think she had slept more than a few vargas at a time since Lance had gone missing, and not at all since the attack on the Atlas.

“Are you okay?” Allura asked, jumping up off her stool to take the tray. “You’re exhausted, you shouldn’t even be on the base.”

“I can’t sit at home and do nothing,” Veronica said dully. “My baby brother is out there somewhere, and now so is Romelle. Every time I try to sleep I just lay there and think that I should have tried harder to do something.”

She was referring to Lance’s rampage. Veronica had been one of the first people forced to the safety corridors, and the only person from the bridge ordered away. She’d wanted to try to talk to her brother, see if she could help talk him down, but Shiro hadn’t thought it wise to let them interact.

Allura could see both sides, but she had to agree with Shiro. She had watched the surveillance video of the sixth floor fight, Lance had been a blank slate soldier. If Veronica had gone in there and he had hurt her, he’d be devastated once they brought him home and he realized what he’d done. It was already likely to be a very long time before he’d forgive himself over how close he’d come to killing Shiro.

“You shouldn’t beat yourself up,” Allura advised gently, thankfully taking a sandwich Veronica handed her from the tray. “There was nothing more anyone could do. We all thought we were prepared for anything and we were wrong, we just have to get up and keep going. Keith is out there tracking your brother, he’s one of the best the Blade of Marmora have. If anyone will bring Lance and Romelle home, he will.”

Allura didn’t know if she really believed it even as she said it. She had also seen the surveillance video from the memory chamber, and she could only guess at Keith’s current disposition. They were all somewhat fragile sometimes, a consequence of youth coming up against the horrors of war, so she could only hope Keith was currently steady enough to not risk himself unnecessarily.

Veronica pulled up a stool next to her, but didn’t touch her own food. Instead she rested her head tiredly on Allura’s shoulder, and Allura let her own head fall down to lightly rest against her friend’s. She hated to see the people she cared about so sad.

“What are you working on?” Veronica asked, pulling off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. “Isn’t that Shiro’s arm?”

“Yes,” Allura lifted her head and sighed, picking up the tweezers she’d been using. She tilted the arm forward and used them to lift some wires out of the open panel so the cracks in the rubber casing were visible. “Lance really did a number on it when he pulled the power source out, it’s been randomly shorting out since we pulled it out of the trash chute. Poor Shiro got quite the shock from it earlier. I suppose it’s partially my fault…I knew it was a bit of a hack job when I put it together, but time was of the essence and I’d only had a few vargas to work on it. I always meant to come back to it and give him something better, it just never seemed pressing.”

“It’s light years ahead of the technology we had on Earth, I don’t think he minds it,” Veronica answered. She finally raised her head and started to make an effort to eat, nodding toward an open leather-bound book set in a stand on the table. “Is that from…your mom?”

She was referring to the storage locker Pidge and Keith had brought back to the Garrison. Allura tried not to think about her trip to the morgue, or the long moments spent standing over the metal table under bright lights. The dry desert cave had produced a desiccated mummy still identifiable even after all these years, right down to the opalescent white braid and the scraped and scuffed pink armor.

It was a horror in one way, but a boon in the other. Finally she would be able to personally lay at least one of her parents to rest, and Iverson was pressing for it to be done with full military honors. Allura would have a place to go to grieve and to remember, instead of staring out at the dark night sky and wondering.

But the storage locker had not only preserved Queen Melenor.

“Yes,” Allura answered, picking up the book and laying it flat between them for Veronica to see better. “There were five books with her, three of them are my father’s and two belonged to Merla. All of their studies, all of their knowledge, things I thought were gone forever. I never knew how many basic alchemical principles I didn’t understand until I looked through my father’s academy notes. I’ve been making so many things so much harder than they needed to be.”

Veronica tried to answer, but it came out in a yawn. If she didn’t sleep soon she was going to either pass out or go mad.

“Veronica, look at me,” Allura requested. When her friend turned to glance at her she reached up, lightly pressing two fingers to her temple. Like Allura herself had done and the hands of her father so long ago, Veronica immediately fell unconscious.

Allura wrapped her sandwich back up and tucked it in her lab coat pocket along with a tablet, carefully picking Veronica up and carrying her out of the lab. Down the hallway was an employee break room, quiet except for two of Sam’s assistants talking quietly with cups of coffee. She sat Veronica on the sofa, tossing her tablet and sandwich on the table next to it before sitting down. She pulled her friend down to use her lap as a pillow and draped the lab coat over her like a blanket.

While Veronica slept, Allura finished her sandwich and brought up the Atlas surveillance video for what must have been the hundredth time. She already knew every move and blow by heart, but somehow it was still shocking to see the sudden wave of color flood into Lance’s features. She watched a little bit past that, up to the point where he jumped and spun to straddle Shiro’s prosthetic, jamming a Galra blade into the seam and prying out the crystal.

It was the little spark she saw there that had her concerned, the little flash that happened when Lance’s fingers reached into the prosthetic’s inner workings. He was most certainly not an alchemist, he hadn’t the smallest iota of training, but somewhere in that core that had once belonged to King Alfor there were instinctive movements and actions. That split-second glow that happened was a flash of quintessence manipulation, Lance using the crystal to fry the prosthetic’s wiring even as he removed it.

He didn’t know what he was doing. They needed to get him home and get his own memories back, stop him from needing to lean on the instincts of a previous life. Eventually he was going to try to do something big without understanding how or why, and he was going to hurt himself.

Allura reached into the pocket of the blouse she wore, using two fingers to pull out the small bag that held the softly glowing crystal. It had been hers for so very long before she’d passed it on, but she didn’t miss it.

Yes, it held a lot of memories for her. This gem had been set in the tiara her parents had made for her as a teenager, the mark of royalty she had worn and carried with her always. But she hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice it for the good of one of the Paladins, and she would make the same decision again if she had the choice. They had sacrificed so much themselves, followed her and trusted her right from the beginning, and Shiro especially had believed in her even when she hadn’t believed in herself.

She wore a new headpiece now, the crown of the Altean Queen brought to her by Keith and Pidge. The glow of the larger stones in it was greater than the one in the bag, which Allura knew shouldn’t be the case. She had picked up something in Oriande, something that she had carried with her and passed on to Shiro with this stone, but the presence she had felt within it ever since leaving that sacred place was gone.

It was no longer present in the Atlas either, which left only one terrible option: it was gone, along with the Infinite Zero core.

Allura had avoided saying—or even overtly thinking—what she suspected about the presence, that it was the White Lion she’d encountered in Oriande. If that thought was true then the situation was more dire than they’d thought, because not only did Honerva now have the Infinite Zero but also one of the most legendary alchemical spirits of the Altean people.

And she had been the one to bring it out of its temple and into danger.

* * * * * * * * * *

 ** _10,000 Years ago_** :

The staff made contact with its target’s abdomen, setting off a light and eliciting a beep. Allura ducked and wove to avoid the Gladiator’s return blow, catching it from behind at the ankles with a forceful downward sweep. The android went down and she went in for the kill, slamming the end of the staff into its chest to disable it with a well-placed electrical charge. The green light flashed again, and the android went dormant.

“Very good!” Tandar, her fighting coach, praised over the intercom from the viewing booth. “A little messy on the sweep, but we’ll work on it. All right Balen, you’re next.”

The door to the training room opened as she approached it, admitting another ten-decaphoeb-old, a boy only a little taller than Allura. He stepped aside so she could leave first, peeking in at the Gladiator still lying on the floor.

“Nice!” He praised, offering her a high five. Allura slapped his hand she ran past, grinning as she tossed him the staff on her way to the stairs and up into the viewing booth.

“Aunt Orla!” She exclaimed, forgetting that she was a sweaty mess as she bound over to hug her mother’s sister. “What did you think? Did I do good? Did I pass?”

“I think you’ll get your results along with everyone else,” Orla chastised gently, resting a hand affectionately on Allura’s hair. “Test administrators can’t talk about results until they’ve been processed, darling. But I’m sure if you take a copy of your performance to your mother she’ll go over it with you.”

Tandar ran his fingers across the console, making a copy of Allura’s test, and offered her a small data chip once the video was transferred.

“Go on now,” he advised, smiling kindly. “You’re holding up the next test by being in here. I’m sure Her Highness is dying to see what you can do.”

Allura took the data chip excitedly, starting to run out of the room. She remembered herself, stopping and turning to face the two older warriors. Snapping her heels together and putting her hands at her sides, she gave a deep bow, then darted out of the room.

The House of Seven Spires, Altea’s main military base and academy, was abuzz with activity as students of all ages hurried to their course-end tests and exams. There was no shortage of young Alteans who looked similar to Allura, uniform askew and hair matted with sweat from hours of grueling combat testing, or parents anxiously waiting for younger children from the lower levels. Allura ran through the halls to her class’ locker room, peeling off her dirty combat uniform and rushing through a shower.

She barely bothered to dry her hair, still actively dripping water in puddles as she ran through the halls to the front lobby, occasionally stopping to jump in an attempt to see over the heads of taller students.

“Coran!” Shouted when she saw the telltale orange hair. “Coran! I think I passed!”

“Wonderful!” Coran beamed at her as she threaded her way through the crowd to his side, twirling his fluffy mustache. “You know what I think? I think that sounds like a good reason for a treat. Let’s get you home to your mom and dad, they’re probably dying to celebrate.”

Coran took her bag and led Allura across the flower-filled gardens, to the lot where their hover awaited. She climbed in the back while he took the front, twisting to kneel on the seat and look out at the view as they passed at high speed.

Elegant towers and high spanning bridges shone white in the sunlight of the spring afternoon, the clear sky overhead giving a clear view of the Great Ring. It was the biggest of Altea’s space bridges, huge, man-made rings that encircled the planet and acted as docking stations for inter-system travelers. Up there, in the commercial district, merchants from Telsadri would be selling crates of fine silks to local Alatean buyers, and Altean restaurateurs would be striking deals with Dwelsan vendors to contract shipments of fresh, imported herbs.

The royal hover turned off the main road to cross the Bridge of Exaltations, slowing as it approached the palace. One of the guards came down the stairs to open the door for her and help her out, taking her bag from Coran and passing it on to one of the maids to take to her room. Allura thanked everyone politely and stepped calmly into the palace when the door was opened for her, making her way through the foyer and to the left where the door to her father’s laboratory sat.

Once she was through and the door closed quietly behind her, Allura took off at a delighted run, skipping and dancing down the long hallway to the great vaulted room where King Alfor conducted his experiments. He was at his work bench when she arrived, writing carefully in a leather-bound book with a fountain pen.

“Father!” She exclaimed, bounding over to throw her arms around his waist. “I think I passed! I think I passed!”

“Did you?” Alfor’s face lit up in a smile when Allura appeared and he set aside his pen, taking the offered data chip and holding it up to look at it. “And Orla even sent a record! Your mother will be so proud…she was two decaphoebs older than you are now before she passed the third level, you know. But don’t tell her that I told you.”

He closed his book and carried it over to the big shelf in the room before offering his hand, and the two left the lab to head back down the hallway. On the way through the foyer someone opened the front doors again, stirring the air inside with the warm currents of the day. A faint scent caught Allura’s nose, pleasant and cheerful.

“I’m going to grab mother some flowers!” She declared, letting go of Alfor’s hand to scurry out front to the stretch of narrow garden that ran around the perimeter of the castle.

She darted here and there, picking out just the right blossoms to form the perfect bouquet, until she needed both hands to carry them back into the castle. Her father was waiting patiently by the door, speaking to one of the guards, stopping to inspect her gathered treasure.

“Very good choices,” he praised. “Let’s stop and grab a vase, your mother can put them on the table during tea.”

The storage room near the kitchen was empty and quiet when they arrived, and Allura carefully set her flowers in a large metal bowl while she began to peruse the available vases. Alfor lifted her up so she could check the higher shelves, and at length she settled on one of clear, cut crystal. They took everything over to the kitchen so she could fill it with water, but when she began to start arranging the blooms she found she had a problem.

“The stems are too short,” she complained, fighting to keep a large white flower from falling out completely. “I have to go pick new flowers!”

“Wait, let’s take a look and see if there’s something we can do about this first,” Alfor suggested, pulling over a stool.

He lifted Allura to sit on the counter before seating himself, taking the flowers from the vase and spreading them out on the counter in front of them. He lined them up by stem length, setting aside the ones that were fine before picking up one that was plucked far too close to the bloom.

Allura watched with delight as a web of aqua light enveloped his fingers, which he moved deftly to wrap delicate strands of quintessence around the stem of the flower. He wove and coaxed, slowly adding length, until the stem was as long as the others. The additional few inches were a light blue color but otherwise looked identical, and when Alfor passed her the flower she swore it was the same to the touch.

“How did you do that?” She asked as he picked up another, beginning his work again.

“Alchemy is always at its strongest when it’s used in the name of life,” Alfor smiled. “Some might see it simply as a form of power, but all power has an element. Alchemy is a power for creation, it can heal and change, and when our intent is pure it can do amazing things.”

He expanded the stems one by one, until they were long enough to stay in the vase on their own. Allura knelt on the counter, arranging them to her satisfaction, until Melenor called them for tea.

* * * * * * * * * *

 ** _Current day_** :

Allura turned the little crystal over in her fingers, lost in thoughts and memories. To the world—rather, to the universe—ten thousand years had passed since the fall of planet Altea, but to her it was less than two decaphoebs. Less than two years, in Earth time. One moment she had been in the middle of a war and the next she had awoken to five strangers.

Her school friend Balen, who had been by her side since she’d first picked up a staff and was preparing to enter the academy with her to learn Alchemy, a wartime casualty. Tandar, her coach and favorite teacher, fallen in battle. Orla, her majestic aunt, gone to hide the Red Lion, and Allura didn’t even know what had become of her because the Galra had found it and removed it.

So many names, lost and forgotten, written nowhere but in her own imperfect memory. So many faces erased, so many voices silenced, parents and children and lovers and friends. No monuments remained, it was as if Altea’s children had never existed.

Allura slid the gem back into her blouse pocket and reached up to pluck a loose hair from her ponytail. She broke off a piece about the length of her hand, twirling it around one finger to let the broken end hang.

_Alchemy is at its strongest when it’s used in the name of life._

She brought up her opposite hand to hover beneath the end of the hair, concentrating on it and trying to will something to happen. But she didn’t know what she was trying to make occur, and the end result was that nothing did.

Frustrated, she gave up and let her head fall back against the sofa.

* * * * * * * * *

 ** _10,000 years ago_** :

“And so, during the cartilian movement of every decaphoeb, we hold the Festival of Stars to celebrate the creation of a single, planet-wide nation. What they don’t teach you in lower level classes is the extent of the wars that led to the nation’s founding. Please turn to page 143 in your books—”

Allura looked up from paging through her textbook as a shadow overtook the sun, throwing her classroom into a darkness unnatural for late morning. The fifteen young men and women from Altea’s noble houses looked at each other quizzically before moving as one to the window, looking up at the ship that had come to rest over the capital.

“What’s a Galra cruiser doing here?” Allura’s friend Callina asked from beside her, gazing up at the huge monster lurking up above. “I thought they were all being used in the relocation.”

“Some of the Galra are moving here to the capital,” a boy named Salor mused from the other side of Callina. “I know they’ve been bringing them down over in Moonwood and then helping them move in from there, maybe that’s where it’s headed.”

“No, it’s stationary,” Allura frowned. “That’s so strange.”

Behind them, the professor’s viewscreen flickered as somebody activated the worldwide security warning system. At first Allura wondered why her father would be doing that, but the face that came up on the screen was not King Alfor.

“My fellow Galra,” the voice was familiar, but at the same time not. Perhaps he and Alfor weren’t as close now as they had once been, but Allura had met Zarkon and knew him well enough to know there was something strangely off-putting. “King Alfor of Altea has destroyed our planet. He must pay dearly for his crimes. Rise up and join your emperor! Revenge will be ours!”

The image flickered again, and the message repeated itself. Allura was having trouble wrapping her head around it. The classroom comm rang and the teacher answered it, stepping out into the hall for privacy.

“This has to be some kind of joke, right?” Salor asked his other classmates. “Emperor Zarkon and Empress Honerva died a few weeks ago. I went to their funeral with my parents.”

“Then it’s a cruel joke,” Callina frowned, looking back out the window. This time she looked out across the mall, where the message was playing on one of the large screens in the gathering square. It was a mix of Alteans and Galra who had stopped walking to watch. “Look at them out there. Those poor people have already lost their leader and their home, haven’t they suffered enough without something like this?”

“Everyone, please return to your seats,” the professor requested as she returned from the hall, turning off the classroom viewscreen. Even so, every screen in the capital seemed to be playing the message on repeat, Allura could hear it echoing outside. “Gather your things and then begin lining up calmly at the door, far left row first. Please remain quiet and orderly.”

“They’re evacuating us,” Callina whispered to Allura as they returned to their chairs to shove their books into their bags. “Something bad is going on.”

“Then we’d better do as we’re told,” Allura whispered back, shouldering her pack. She smoothed down her skirt and hurried over into line between Callina and Salor, her heart up in her throat as the professor made sure everyone was present and then led them out.

The oldest students in the military track were already in the halls, helping the teachers guide the younger ones toward the innermost rooms of the complex. The House of Seven Spires was the most fortified place in the capital aside from the palace, safety was guaranteed there. Allura was halfway down the hallway leading past the cafeteria, letting herself be carried along by the swelling sea of panicking people, when an explosion rang out and the earth shook.

People screamed and ducked, younger students beginning to break away from the group to try and run back the way they’d come. Adults and older kids did their best to corral them back toward safety, trying to keep the tide moving forward in an orderly fashion. Allura picked up her dropped bag with shaking hands and looked wildly around at the crowd for Callina or Salor, but both had been lost in the sudden change of current.

Somebody grabbed her arm and she jumped, fighting as she was pulled over toward the wall. She almost punched them as another explosion came, until she saw the worried face of her best friend.

“Balen, what’s going on?” She shouted over the din of screaming people. “Is that cruiser attacking us?”

“All of the Galra are attacking us!” Balen answered, flattening them both against the wall and beginning to push back against the crowd, pulling her in the opposite direction. “My brother was out doing routine rounds out at the Dalterion Belt yesterday, he only just made it somewhere safe to call. The Dalterion capital fell yesterday, and Nalquod was attacked before that. He said we can only assume that the attacks go as far out as Rygnirath since communications with them are blacked out.”

“How did we not know they were attacking?” Allura asked as they ducked behind an older cadet who was too busy with some younger ones to notice. “We should have had some kind of warning!”

“Communications are going down all over Altea, Allura! They hit fast and hit hard, knocked out their comm systems and made them go dark so they couldn’t send out a warning. Altea’s the last planet in the system that hasn’t fallen yet.”

Another explosion hit, and this one wasn’t in the distance. Allura felt the ground jump under her, saw the air around her fill with the blinding dust of breaking masonry. She felt something graze the side of her head, something scratch her back, pieces of something sharp and hard rain on her arms as she covered her eyes to protect herself. When the dust settled she pushed herself up to find a scarlet, explosion-filled sky over her instead of pristine white ceiling.

The hallway was collapsed in, cutting off one end from the other and burying anyone who’d been standing in the wrong place. Allura could hear screaming and crying, and older voices calling for calm. Something dropped down into the opening, hit the debris below and ignited, filled the hallway with a fireball shooting both ways.

It was only Balen’s quick movement that saved her, throwing her into a nearby classroom and pushing the door closed behind them. He grabbed an abandoned cloak and began pressing it against the bottom to keep out any smoke, and Allura felt herself beginning to panic.

“Callina’s out there!” She exclaimed, raking her hands through her hair and leaving the loose twists askew. “And Salor!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Balen said grimly. “Come on, I need to get you out of here. Coran is over by the practice field with a hover!”

Allura knew that he was right, that there was nothing in her power that could be done to rescue her friends. That cruiser was attacking the heart of the capital with the full intent of killing the children of Altea’s leaders, the only thing she could do was spite them by surviving. The others were in the hands of some of the planet’s most elite instructors, they were bound to be far more help than one inexperienced princess.

“Leave your bag,” Balen advised, pulling a small baton from his belt. He extended it into his fighting staff as he moved to the window, using it to break out the glass. “But bring your staff, you might need it.”

She did as he suggested, pulling her staff from her bag and extending it, leaving everything else behind as she followed him to the window. They were thankfully on the first floor…noble children always were, specifically for reasons of evacuation. She had never thought it would come to use, but clearly she had been wrong.

As they reached the grass below and she look a few steps away from the building, Allura found she couldn’t recognize anything she was looking at. If she hadn’t already gotten her bearings from being inside the history classroom she would have been completely lost, so different was the city now with everything aflame. Shuttles were beginning to bring Galra soldiers down to the surface, and she watched in horror as one such landing party began to cut down any Altean in their path.

Two of the soldiers saw her and Balen, lining up their sights to fire. She threw him to the ground, covering his head with her body as the lasershot hit the wall behind them and showered them with pulverized marble. Both children were back on their feet and charging within an instant, Balen going high and Allura going low.

His staff hit the first soldier in the face as she swept his feet out from under him, and as Balen dropped down to come around at the other soldier’s knees Allura surged up and hit her in the face. Both Alteans slammed the edges of their staves into an enemy’s chest at the same time, sending a shock running through their bodies that incapacitated them.

“A training staff isn’t going to hold them long!” Allura called as they leapt over the fallen soldiers and made a run for the training fields. “The shocks will barely knock them out for a few seconds, and that’s only if we’re lucky!”

“Then let’s try not to get caught with just our training staves again!” Balen advised. “Quiznak, no such luck...one up ahead!”

Allura surged forward, matching Balen’s pace as they leapt at the form emerging from the smoke. It was only by the grace of the gods that the man managed to dance back out of the way, knowing their motions well enough to avoid them.

“Hold your weapons!” Tandar ordered, throwing up an arm to catch Allura’s staff. “Come on, both of you! Everyone’s searching for you!”

Allura took Tandar’s hand and let him pull her across the grass, doing her best to keep up with his pace. She was an excellent runner but not generally in a dress, and she usually had boots or sporting shoes that didn’t slip and slide like her flats.

The hover was waiting just as Balen said, and Coran with it. He looked about ready to faint with relief when he saw her, grabbing her in a tight hug before ushering her into the vehicle. Balen and Tandar joined them, and the hover took off.

It was not a pleasant ride. The beautiful white city that Allura so loved to watch as she rode through it was now a smoking ruin. There was so much fire, so much blood in the streets, so much lasershot echoing through the air. At several points Coran shoved her down to keep her from being visible through the windows, and she didn’t even have a visual of the scene being described to her only through the agonized screams of the dying.

The air was dark with cruisers and thick with strikers when the hover skidded to a stop at the park at the edge of the city. She was ushered out of it, toward the trees, where a form in pink armor was pacing.

“Allura!” Melenor cried in relief when she saw her daughter, sprinting out of her hiding place to grab her in a hug that lifted her clear off her feet. “Oh, gods, my baby…my precious little girl!”

“Balen says the system is fallen,” Allura gushed through tears, hugging her mother just as tightly. “What’s going on? Why are they attacking us? They’re our friends! Why are you armored?”

“First things first, we need to get out of here,” Melenor said firmly, finally letting her go. “Coran, let’s go. Balen, Tandar, are you ready?”

“Your Highness,” Tandar snapped to attention, saluting Melenor with a hand on his chest. “I’m sorry, but I can’t evacuate with you. There may be some people yet who can be evacuated from the city. The royal family needs to go, but I’m far more expendable. And I cannot in good conscience leave behind anyone I might be able to save.”

“I’m staying too,” Balen insisted, giving a slightly more sloppy salute. “We need every able-bodied fighter we have. I may not be much, but I’ll help where I can.”

“You can’t stay here, it’s suicide!” Allura exclaimed. “Just look at the city, they’re tearing it apart!”

“And we’ll join the soldiers who are holding them off long enough for you to escape,” Balen answered, his nonchalance only a thin mask for his obvious fear. “You guys have to live through this so you can coordinate a defensive. Don’t worry, I’ll see you as soon as it’s over.”

He grinned and held up his hand. Allura felt her eyes stinging but she forced a smile, knowing his words were lies and that hers were just as dishonest as she gave him a high five.

“I’ll see you as soon as it’s over.”

The explosions were coming nearer, time was growing short. Allura followed her mother and Coran into the trees where the Blue Lion crouched, bounding up into its cockpit as Melenor threw herself into the pilot’s seat.

“Why are you flying Blue?” Allura asked, grabbing onto the back of the chair. Coran stood behind her, holding it around her and acting as a sort of living safety harness. “Where’s Blaytz?”

“Blaytz is gone, Allura,” Melenor said softly a the Lion started powering up. She had never shielded her daughter from harsh truths. “He died when Nalquod fell. Gyrgan and Trigel as well. Your father lives, but he only barely managed to get their Lions back here a varga before the Galra fleet arrived.”

There was no time to mourn. Blue shot up into the sky then, and Allura was forced to hold on for dear life. She had flown with her father in the Red Lion many times as she grew up, but he had never needed to maneuver to avoid striker and cruiser fire with her in the cockpit. Allura and Coran both eventually lost their footing and found themselves thrown around like rag dolls, until Coran managed to grab the handle of the cockpit door with one arm and Allura with the other.

The Castle of Lions was already in low Altea orbit, its particle barrier lowering just long enough for the Blue Lion to enter before it went back on the defensive. Allura was shaky and aching as they disembarked but she forgot it all at the sight of her father running into the hangar to greet them. He threw his arms around her and hugged her just as tightly as Melenor had, but had to let go much more quickly in light of their precarious circumstances.

“Zarkon’s cruiser is pinging our location,” Alfor told Melenor. “We need to get the Castle of Lions out of orbit. Can you help Merla?”

“Yes,” Melenor nodded.

She gave Allura another quick hug and ran off to find her best friend Merla, a small assurance that others had survived and were here in the Castle. In fact, as Allura followed Alfor out of Blue’s hangar and into the lift, she saw him checking his tablet and noticed others moving around the bridge in the corner video feed.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Allura admitted in the quiet of the lift. “I thought Zarkon was dead. I saw him, at the funeral. Now he’s ordering the Galra to attack us?”

“Zarkon is dead,” Alfor said firmly. “What walks in his body is something we brought back from the rift. Parts of him remain, but the core of what makes him Zarkon is gone. That thing is a lich, using Zarkon’s face to try and get Voltron so it can open a new rift into our universe.”

The lift reached the bridge floor, but Alfor stopped the door from opening. He lifted one of Allura’s scratched and bloodied hands, his own fingers glowing with quintessence as he ran it across hers and left her with healed, smooth skin.

“Listen to me very carefully, Allura. We have a plan to stop Zarkon and save Altea, but there are things that go wrong along the way with every plan. There may come a time when you have to help new Paladins connect with the Lions if I’m not able to. They will be brought here, you won’t have to do anything in that regard, and the Castle will only allow those who should be here. But I’m going to need you to help them in any way you can. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” Allura whispered, trying not to cry.

Alfor opened the lift door and stepped out onto the bridge, and she quietly followed. She was so confused, so lost, with no real idea of what was truly happening anywhere. Members of the royal guard were rushing around, prepping things and calling out commands that left her breathless and dizzy trying to follow.

Something hit the particle barrier, and the floor lurched under her. She was becoming alarmingly familiar with the affects of being hit with bombs and cannons, but this one hit hard. It seemed like multiple cruisers had converged on their location and were firing, and the particle barriers had to be going down. A beep sounded, saying they were being hailed, and then a familiar face came on the viewscreen.

“Zarkon,” Alfor spat.

“Your fleet has been destroyed, Alfor,” Zarkon said calmly. “I will be there shortly to claim Voltron.”

That was the entire missive. He canceled the hail, and then the Castle was struck by a rain of laserfire that damaged the hull. The visuals cut out even as Allura heard two guards rushing to pull the ship out of orbit and begin putting some distance between them and the planet.

Zarkon was coming. Or, rather, the thing that wore Zarkon’s face. All of the inhabited planets in their solar system had fallen and Altea was the only one left that could still muster a counter attack, something needed to be done.

“Father!” She ran to Alfor’s side, grabbing his sleeve. Surely there were pilots on this ship worthy of the other Lions, Blue had clearly allowed someone new to pilot her. “We must form Voltron before it’s too late!”

“It’s already too late,” Alfor said heavily. “We must send the Lions away. We can’t risk them falling into Zarkon’s hands.

Allura had never seen her father look this way, so broken and filled with loss. Like he was too tired to go on, like he couldn’t keep going.

“We can’t give up hope!” She insisted. They were all that was left if Zarkon was right, if their fleet was gone there was nothing but the Castle of Lions between the remaining Alteans and certain death. Sending them away would be sentencing billions of their people to die.

“I’m sorry, daughter,” Alfor answered, lowering his head. “If all goes well, I will see you again soon. I love you.”

He reached up to touch the side of her face. Allura reached back, leaned forward.

“Father…”

Something sparked. Her vision blurred briefly, and when it returned all the noise of the battle had gone silent.

“Hello,” a flirty male voice greeted.

Allura looked up at the boy holding her in his arms, her brain having a momentary disconnect. Only a few ticks ago she had been standing strong under her own power, now her legs felt weak and her body felt slightly cold. She was not where she had only just been standing, and she did not recognize the people here.

“Who are you?” She demanded. “Where am I?”

“I’m Lance,” the boy still had an annoyingly flirty tone, as if she had time for his games. Now, when war was in full swing and millions of lives hung in the balance. “And you’re right here in my arms.”

Allura rolled her eyes and started to push away. That was when she noticed them, the first sign that things were more amiss than she’d originally imagined.

“Your ears,” she murmured.

“Uh, yeah?”

“They’re hideous,” she was unable to be diplomatic about it. They were small and round and strangely deformed, and very much _not_ Altean. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing’s wrong with them, they heard exactly what you said about them!” The boy exclaimed.

Allura took advantage of his distraction to reach up and grab him by one of said ears, twisting it and flipping him around to knock him down to his knees. She held him there, wishing she had some kind of weapon to draw to defend herself against what was obviously an alien intruder.

“Who are you?” She demanded. Allura hoped that if she could sound intimidating enough, they might not notice that she was smaller and had no weapons. Might. “Where is King Alfor? What are you doing in my castle?”

“A giant blue lion brought us here, that’s all we know!” The boy protested.

Blue lion. The Blue Lion had brought them here? And no Altean had been with them to tell them anything? Her mother…

“How do you have the Blue Lion?” Allura tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. “What happened to its Paladin? What are you all doing here? Unless…”

_There may come a time when you have to help new Paladins connect with the Lions if I’m not able to. They will be brought here, you won’t have to do anything in that regard, and the Castle will only allow those who should be here._

She looked around finally, realized she was in the room with the cryopods. She had been put into an extended sleep.

“How long has it been?” She whispered.

“We don’t know what you’re talking about,” the biggest of the strangers finally spoke up. He was tall, with a tuft of white hair and a mechanical prosthetic arm. He was trying to sound calm and reasonable, but Allura wasn’t honestly sure she could do the same. “Why don’t you tell us who you are? Maybe we can help.”

“I am Princess Allura of planet Altea,” Allura answered, pulling herself up to her full height. Admittedly, it wasn’t an impressive height. But her regal bearing was all she had right now. She focused on the information hub in the center of the room, hoping that if she could just keep her mind working on her problem at hand she wouldn’t break down. To her left she finally noticed the other cryopod that had raised, and the familiar form of her father’s advisor Coran within. She was very thankful for the friendly face. “I’ve got to find out where we are, and how long we’ve been asleep.”

She strolled past them to the computer, activating it and pulling up the Castle’s backups. Behind her she could hear Coran waking, and his exchange with the annoying newcomer who had caught her when she’d fallen out of her own pod.

Good, they could have each other for now.

She pulled up the date, but knew when she saw it that it couldn’t be right. There was no way, something was malfunctioning. Allura activated the comm unit, searching for an Altean signal to hail and finding none in the vicinity. She did a scan for where they were, finding that the starmap told her they were on a planet called Arus. It was when she moved to check the distance between them and home that she found herself punched in the gut.

The computer couldn’t make that calculation. The planets of Altean’s solar system were all confirmed destroyed.

“It can’t be,” she murmured. Coran was startled out of his fooling around.

“What is it?”

Allura looked down at the starmap, at the captured images of her home solar system, at the digital photographs taken of Altea drifting in pieces before the Castle had left. Below it were the results of the ID scan the Castle had performed before allowing these newcomers into its core.

IDENTITY 1 CONFIRMED: ALFOR

IDENTITY 2 CONFIRMED: ZARKON

IDENTITY 3 CONFIRMED: TRIGAL

IDENTITY 4 CONFIRMED: GYRGAN

IDENTITY 5 UNCONFIRMED: UNKNOWN ORIGIN SPECIES_

 _The Castle will only allow those who should be here_ , Alfor had said, and he’d asked her if she could help new Paladins. Well, those new Paladins were here, and she’d been out of commission waiting for them for a very long time.

“We’ve been asleep for 10,000 years.”

* * * * * * * * * *

 ** _Current day_** :

Allura ran her thumb over the back of her hand, thinking about that day in the lift on the way to the bridge. The last affectionate touch of her father, as he healed away some of her scratches the way he had always done when she was a little girl.

Only doboshes before he’d left her, abandoned her to the future. Given up everything so that she would survive, in the faint hope that she might one day save the universe.

“I’m trying,” she whispered, lightly touching one finger to her skin, tracing where she still vividly remembered the cuts. “I’m trying as hard as I can.”

She paused in tracing the faint scars, frowning at the marks. Remembering how easily her father used to mend her injuries.

_Alchemy is always at its strongest when it’s used in the name of life._

_It can heal and change and create._

Not heal _or_ change _or_ create. Heal _and_ change _and_ create, because all three worked the same way. She knew how to heal.

Allura almost threw Veronica’s unconscious body to the floor in her sudden need to rise, barely catching her and repositioning her on the couch before she darted out of the break room and down to her lab. She slammed the door closed behind her and locked it this time, racing to her table and picking through the alchemy notebooks there.

She found the one she was looking for, threw it open and paged through it wildly. No. No. No. No.

_Yes._

Allura grabbed the scissors and cut a lock of her hair, picking out a strand and laying it by itself on the table. She focused on it, not on trying to will something to happen to it from outside but on the cells within. Quintessence was life, to control one was to control both. She could already do that in the spiritual sense, now she needed to do it physically.

Her fingers began to light up in a web of aqua glow and the cells of the hair reacted, replicating and extending and growing. Within a few moments Allura was holding a hair that was almost the full length of her style rather than just a small snippet.

She had done it.

“All right, Honerva, you creepy old witch,” she whispered, pulling over a stool and spreading the remaining hairs out on the table in front of her. She flicked her fingers lightly, calling up that familiar blue glow and preparing to practice until she got the principle perfect. “You want to see what a real alchemist is made of? Then I’ll show you one.”


	2. Chapter 2

**_Current day_** :

Lansar sat quietly in the middle of the common room sofa, his legs crossed and his hands folded in his lap. There was a broadcast on the viewscreen of a Galran sport called dreskell, he was watching the players dart back and forth across the field trying to get a small spiked ball across different score lines using only short, hooked sticks.

Ariella sat to his right and a boy named Kildar to his left, with one or two others he wasn’t really paying attention to scattered around the room on the floor. Ariella held a palette in her hand and was streaking the colors across Lansar’s face, her tongue sticking out a bit as she tried to recreate some look that had been fashionable among the Alteans back on her colony. Kildar was adjusting a cuff on Lansar’s ear, silver with a red gem that hung down similar to the jewelry some of the others wore.

They were the youngest two here, both of them thirteen, but the group as a whole didn’t skew too much older. Haran and Natille led the charge at eighteen with most of the rest being sixteen and seventeen. Only Anya and Karlor, Honerva’s two most trusted druids, were over twenty.

That there were children going to war didn’t sit well with Lansar, but the fact that there were children giving him a makeover in the quiet afternoon hours didn’t bother him. He had discovered that he liked kids, even the slightly older ones, and what they were doing was just harmless fun.

It reminded him of something, a vague memory of walking along a beach, slightly bent over as he held two tiny hands. A little girl and boy screaming with happiness as the water rushed up to lap their ankles.

He picked up what the thought might be an eyeliner and pushed up his sleeve slightly, scribbling something that came to mind on his palm.

_Nadia, Sylvio_

Lansar put the eyeliner down and looked back at the viewscreen as he felt the now-tedious vibrations at his wrist, barely even noticing the brief lapse in time during which his mind went completely blank. He regained focus as a new player got the ball and headed toward the other end of the field, wondering what he'd been thinking about this time. This so-called treatment had become more of a disease than a cure, regularly leaving him standing somewhere without knowing when he'd gotten there, why he'd come, or what he'd intended to do.

The suppressors didn't block everything, but since by their very nature they erased thoughts he was so far unable to put together a pattern of what subjects were consistently wiped away. He only knew what he was allowed to remember, and those were mostly things regarding the outpost and people in it.

Or violence. He was able to remember how to use his weapons of choice, he was able to remember what few close combat skills he had. He was able to remember Shirogane and Kogane, but only when it came to things like the moment he'd tried to bury a knife in the older man's neck or held a gun to the younger one's head. If he tried to remember anything else about them, like how he'd first met them or moments outside of war...

The bracelets vibrated again. His mind blanked. He drifted back in to find a point had just been scored.

"Hey, I have something I have to go do, you guys mind if I bail?" He asked Ariella and Kildar. They both backed off and let him get up, turning instead to decorating each other.

Lansar left the common room and went two doors down, making sure he was alone before he let himself into an empty office there. The door was usually closed since nobody used it, but he'd found it while he was bored and snooping around. He made his way over to the small window and leaned against it, looking out at the dark expanse of space.

As alone as he could be, in as much quiet as was available, he pulled up his sleeves just enough to examine the two suppressors he wore. One was new, added to replace the broken one in spite of his protests. He hadn’t even shown anyone that the first had been removed, Honerva had just known even though his wrists weren’t visible when he’d gone to the debriefing after the Atlas attack.

But that wasn’t what made him wary of trying to remove them, what gave him pause there was that the two times he’d tried since returning to the outpost had ended with him receiving a shock strong enough to temporarily knock him unconscious. Nobody had come to address him about it so he didn’t think anyone knew, but he wasn’t eager to try it again.

So Lansar now knew that Honerva could keep track of the bracelets if she wanted, but that she didn’t actively do it all the time. It was likely she used them to keep tabs on him whenever he had freedom to potentially wander, but ignored him when he was tucked away safely at the base. That made him think she was worried that he would choose not to stay here of his own free will.

His trust was completely eroded at this point. In the last two quintants Lansar had begun to look at everyone with a healthy dose of suspicion, though he kept it to himself and pretended otherwise. He still didn’t believe he was completely friendly with Allura or her lot, the feelings of fear leftover after his memories of them were suppressed were too strong to be fake, but he no longer felt like anybody here at the outpost had his best interests at heart either.

He pulled his sleeves back down over his wrists and left his perch, wandering out of the office and down the hall toward his quarters. Halfway there he changed his mind, stopping at a closed door and hesitating before knocking lightly.

“What?” Romelle’s voice called irritably from inside. “Honestly, you haven’t left me alone since we got here, I’ve already told you everything I—oh.”

She stopped in surprise when she pulled open the door and found him there, clearly having expected someone else. Lansar wasn’t too shocked by that, he had been able to tell from Honerva’s expression when they had returned that she knew of Romelle somehow. That knowledge didn’t appear to be mutual, though.

“I came to see if you needed anything,” Lansar offered, glancing past her into the room. There was no shortage of books or small amusements lying around, most likely brought to her by the younger kids who were excited to meet another new Altean.

“To not be locked up like an animal would be nice,” Romelle answered, leaning against her doorway with her arms crossed. “I haven’t seen more than this hallway in two days.”

Two days. She used human time measurements, she must have been with them for a while. 

“It’s for your own safety. This is a Galra outpost, if they realize we’re Alteans we could all be killed. They don’t let me leave the top two levels of this hub either, it’s not just you.” Lansar offered her an arm. “Come on, how about lunch? Have you eaten today?”

Romelle was obviously angry at him for bringing her here and greatly regretting her choice to follow. But after a moment of grumbling she did take his arm, and he led her down the hall past the common room and into the small room where everyone went to eat. It was sort of a mix between a kitchen and some kind of office break room.

The Alteans here didn’t live on any specific schedule or have their meals at specific times, everyone fended for themselves. Food was kept stocked by regular provision deliveries sent by shuttle from wherever Honerva’s real, planet-side home base was, which was an adventure. Wherever the supplies came from it wasn’t a planet Lansar had ever been to, because he didn’t recognize any of the plants or meats stored here.

“What are you in the mood for?” Lansar asked, opening the pantry. “We have…red colored fruit things, purple things that might be vegetables, some kind of dried plant that might be a spice or might be garnish. This looks like a grain.”

“That’s a doga,” Romelle corrected him, picking up one of the red, hand-sized spheres. “It’s a tangy vegetable. The purple thing is called a plansku, it’s very sweet. And the jar you’re holding is rusk, it’s sort of like the rice on Earth.”

“Hey, I found myself a professional,” Lansar grinned, shaking the jar of grains in his hand. “You don’t happen to know what to do with any of it, do you?”

“Hunk would be so ashamed of you right now,” Romelle sighed, taking the jar from him. She glanced over the pantry, picking out some vegetables before going to poke through the cold storage. “Of course I know about their food, Lance. These people were all born in the same place I was, I grew up eating these things.”

She handed him a knife from the drawer and put him to work slicing up some root vegetables. Lansar did as he was told, making mental notes for the next time he was in here alone with no clue.

“So, you know me?” He finally broached a subject he’d avoided so far. Lansar hadn’t wanted to ask Romelle about himself until she’d been here a few quintants, after interest in her and what she knew died down enough that nobody was watching to see if he came to question her. “You called me by name when you first saw me on the Atlas.”

“Of course I know you. I live with your sister, I eat dinner at your parents’ house on Sundays.”

Lansar stopped cutting and glanced up, feeling a little shock run through his brain that had nothing to do with memories or his suppressors. Parents? Sister? He felt like he knew those words, like they were important words. He had to really think about it, really dig down deep before the definitions came up. Those were words that described family. Families were groups of people, usually related by blood.

This was a fundamental concept, one he knew, but for some reason it rolled around in his head like it was alien.

“What are these?” Lansar jumped as Romelle pushed back one of his sleeves to show the suppressor, it’s red light blinking as he tried to follow the thread of his thought. He hadn’t even noticed her cross the room. “What do they do?”

“They block bad memories,” Lansar answered, gently pulling his arm out of her hands. “I was in a war, I got hurt really bad. Sometimes it comes back and bites.”

“You mean when your Lion fell.” Romelle glanced around the kitchen and toward the door after she said it, as if making sure they were well and truly alone. “Lance, you’re the pilot of the Red Lion. The war you’re talking about happened when the Galra invaded Earth, you fought with the other Paladins to free the planet.

“After the final fight a mech Ariella was piloting showed up, it had a self-destruct protocol that activated once it was put out of commission. You fell from the upper atmosphere, that was where you were hurt. You pulled enough power to try to save Keith, your Lion crashed near the Garrison. Your sister Veronica pulled you out of the wreckage, her and James Griffin. He’s the other pilot you disappeared with. These people _are_ the ones who injured you in the war.”

Romelle was so sincere, it was hard to doubt that she believed her own words. And he felt like she was telling him the truth when she said she knew him well. But everything else was just words, he couldn’t connect what she was telling him to his own experience.

"Nadia and Sylvio," she noticed the words on his palm and flipped his arm over, pushing his sleeve up further. "That's your niece and nephew. And...oh."

The movement of his sleeve revealed what looked like more ink. Just as curious as she was, Lansar let Romelle push his sleeve up to reveal a virtual cacophony of words, scribbled in various states of hurry and with whatever happened to be on hand. Shocked, Lansar pulled up his other sleeve and found the same thing.

Red Veradero

**kaltenecker** RED

Lance McClain

lance Keith

Veronica! _keith_

pidge is katie

**keith** **_r e d_** allura

Shiro

L A N C E M C C L A I N ! !

Hunk _kosmo_

red haggar=bad

_Griffin_

KEITH **Red**

Luis marco

_lance mcclain_ adam?

Rachel Coran k o l i v a n

Some of the letters were neat and small, some were hastily scrawled. Some looked angry, frustrated at being unable to hold onto the thought. They were written in black and red and blue, all the way up to his elbows on both arms, and he couldn't remember having written any of it.

"Kaltenecker," Romelle read from the names, tracing over them with a finger as she went. "That's a cow you all found at a trade hub mall. Veradero is the beach you grew up near. Pidge is Katie Holt's nickname, she pilots the Green Lion. Hunk is your best friend, he pilots Yellow. Marco and Luis are your brothers, Rachel and Veronica are your sisters.

"Coran is Allura's advisor, you said he was like an uncle to you, and Kolivan is the leader of the Blade of Marmora. Shiro is like a big brother to everyone, you've always seemed to look up to him, I don't know who Adam is. Keith is your leader, you argue and fight a lot but you both seem to actually enjoy it, and lately you've become very close. You have to remember these people, Lance, there's no way you'd ever forget any of them."

He tried to picture each person she talked about, tried to imagine them connecting to him in the way she said they did. He thought he could almost imagine standing in a dingy little room in a tiny shack in a desert with a handful of these people, but when he tried to recall more detail he felt the suppressors kick in.

This time he tried to fight it. Lansar was interested in what Romelle had to say, he wanted to gauge her honesty on his own. He pushed back against the chilling feeling of everything starting to go blank until he was suddenly brought crashing to earth by a painful shock running through both arms. One moment he was looking at Romelle, the next he was on the floor staring at a blurry light fixture on the ceiling.

“Lance! Are you all right?” Romelle was still here, he definitely hadn’t made that up. She helped him sit up and he rubbed an aching arm. The lights of both suppressors were lit now, and he had a bad feeling about it. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” he lied, getting shakily to his feet and pulling down his sleeves. “Just forget it happened.”

“But—“

“Forget it,” he repeated. The lights were still on, and he could at least remember that never happened before and know it meant something was up. Something that might mean trouble for everyone involved. “And forget whatever conversation we just had ever happened. Believe me, I already just did.”

Even as he said it he saw movement in the hallway, and less than a tick later Anya appeared in the doorway. She wore the full cowl and cloak of a druid, like she always did, but he could tell it was her by her build.

“Is everything all right?” She asked, her voice tinted strangely by the mask she wore. Her tone was sweet, compassionate, and a far cry from the utter lack of expression her face was probably actually showing. “I thought I heard raised voices.”

Lansar already knew it was the bracelets that had called her in, either directly or by alerting Honerva that someone needed to be sent. Still, he played dumb, going back to the cutting board he’d been working at.

“I think I fainted,” he lied. “I’m not sure. I’ve had a headache since the Atlas. I'll be okay once I eat, I think, we were just making lunch."

"Poor boy, you should have come to us," Anya's voice was practically dripping with concern as she came all the way into the room and approached him. "You know your condition is delicate."

She removed the knife from his grip and pulled him away from the counter, lifting his hands one at a time to touch two of her fingers to each bracelet. It seemed like she was using alchemy to reset them, the lights going off as she finished.

That was why he couldn't get them off. It didn't matter how many codes he tried, it wasn't a code they reacted to. They worked by alchemy.

She was about to let him go when she saw the black smeared on his palm.

"It looks like you've put your hand in something," she said kindly, lightly pushing his sleeve up further with a finger and catching sight of the scrawls on his arms. "Come, let's get you cleaned up."

"No, it's okay, I can do that in the shower later," Lance insisted, trying to pull his arms back. Anya's hands closed tighter on his wrists, stopping him. "And I don't want to just ditch Romelle."

"Romelle will be just fine," Anya countered, her grip remaining fearsome even though her tone and stance were relaxed. "Let's just get you somewhere quiet and fix your head right up."

Karlor appeared in the hall then, just in view of the doorway, and Lansar knew he wasn't really being given a choice. He sighed and let himself be led, out of the small kitchen and down past the residences to the very end where Honerva's war room sat. They took him inside and he saw her over at a star map on the wall, but she didn't even bother to look at him as they forced him into a seat over by her desk.

He felt Karlor's hands touch his temples and saw Anya lift her mask, her face its usual impassive expression as she reached down to do something with the bracelets on his wrists. Then everything went blank.

* * * * * * * * * *

**_Two days ago_** :

The pain from the knife was not as bad as it could be, thanks to the adrenaline pumping in the moment. It hurt, a lot, but it wasn't enough to stop him or slow him down now in the heat of a fight.

It helped that Lansar was angry. Angry that Natille couldn't even keep turn a ship properly without doing something to grate on his nerves, mad at the Atlas for existing in the first place, and mad at the universe for making this war necessary to begin with.

But really, _really_ mad that he'd been through everything he had today only to end up getting stabbed by accident.

Lansar reached down and yanked the knife out of his side, letting his anger fuel his motion as he slammed the blade into the floor. There was blood smeared on the black Paladin's bracer and to be honest Kogane looked shocked, which wasn't really something he had expected from a soldier who had undoubtedly taken plenty of lives in the course of the war. In fact, Kogane was one of the more dangerous ones, Lansar knew, right after Shirogane, so a little blood shouldn't have fazed him at all.

There was some pain he did feel even through the rush, but the way it sat told him he would probably be fine. It felt like it was mostly surface damage, skin and muscle, probably nothing too important in there nicked on the inside. Then again, even if it was fatal it wasn't like Lansar had time to sit around and die dramatically, he had a job to do.

He took advantage of the moment and grabbed his gun, pressing the barrel to Kogane's head from were he sat straddling the other fighter's middle. Lansar already knew what would come next and he tensed, preparing for his opponent's move. It would be a fist in the side, digging into the fresh wound, then the same hand would go for the knife, bring it up and bury the blade in his neck.

That was the script for this kind of conflict, these moments of fighting explicitly over who got to survive. It was no holds barred and go for the kill.

Lansar's finger rested on the trigger, ready and waiting for Kogane's move. Kogane didn't hit him as expected but he did reach for the knife, his fingers tightening around the handle. All it would take was one move, one hint that he was bringing the blade up, and Lansar could fire. He could put an end to this and walk away the victor.

Only Kogane didn't move. He didn't pull the knife free, he didn't take a swing. His face went from stunned to a look reminiscent of resignation, and after a moment he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable. Lansar glared down at him, somehow even angrier that Kogane wouldn't defend himself, that he was willing to just sit there and be slaughtered for no reason.

No reason. Lansar already knew Kogane was the better swordsman. The better strategist. The better hand-to-hand combatant. There was absolutely no reason, whatsoever, for him to just give up and let his enemy win.

And that was what they were, absolutely...enemies.

* * * * * * * * * *

**_Two years ago_** :

Something was broken down in his leg, and his ears were ringing. At some point he had been standing under his own power, walking even, but now he was lying on the hard metal floor and was having trouble waking up fully.

He remembered a light, and a loud noise, and then feeling as if he was being crushed in on all sides. Lots of heat, not just on the outside but also in his throat. And there was a pain where his head rested against the floor, as if he had hit it.

Lance was no stranger to injuries, anyone who had ever been hit in the head hard enough in a Karate class knew what a concussion could be like, and anyone who'd ever done ballet for more than a year knew real pain. He wanted to shrug it off and get up, tell everyone he would be fine, but his body didn't want to move. He heard their voices as they approached even though his eyes wouldn't open, took a breath to try and speak but coughed instead in the thick smoke of the room.

Someone lifted his head, he felt a hand resting on his chest. "He doesn't look good."

Lance wondered who Shiro meant. Maybe Coran, Coran had been here during the explosion. He knew Shiro wasn't talking about him, Lance felt perfectly fine except for that pain in his leg. All he needed was a minute, he'd been through worse than this.

He would have said so if he could get a breath. And if the room didn't feel so bright that he had to keep his eyes closed.

The ringing in his ears started to die down a little, enough for him to catch the sounds of people leaving.

"--tend to Lance and stand watch over the castle."

Babysat. Something was going on, and he was being babysat by Shiro. Not Keith, obviously, Keith got to go running off and deal with whatever was happening, but of course Lance would be stuck staying behind. Because of what? A broken leg, maybe? A headache?

He groaned and opened his eyes slightly, trying to look around the room. It was a mess of crystal shards and one door was broken clear off. Lance started to move, to see if everything worked and if maybe he could sit up.

"Whoa, whoa, stop," Shiro's hand was on his chest again, holding him down. "Don't try to move."

"'m fine," Lance mumbled, closing his eyes again.

He meant to prove it, to hop up and do a cartwheel or something, but somehow he managed to doze off instead. He went completely unconscious, and the next time his eyes opened again it was to find himself looking at the back of Shiro's armor, upside down.

There was a shoulder in his abdomen. It hurt. He made a noise, moving slightly to try and relieve the pressure on organs that really didn't need pressure right now.

"Hang on buddy," Shiro advised. "Help is on the way."

"I think you're rupturing my spleen," Lance slurred. Or rather, he tried to. What came out of his mouth was a strange, strangled noise that sounded even to him more like somebody gargling mouthwash than speaking. He coughed, hard, and saw blood drip down to the floor below.

He was somewhat aware of being flipped over and laid down as the pressure in his abdomen released and gravity shifted the way it was pulling on him. There was some loud noise and he still hurt, so very much, but it was enough of an improvement that he slipped into unconsciousness once again.

The next time Lance danced to the surface of the waking world it was because of the screams. He was lying on his side now, back on the hard floor. His eyes didn't want to open very much, but they cracked open enough for him to see Shiro kneeling beside him, with Sendak running some kind of current through him.

Sendak was clearly enjoying it, and Shiro...even in Lance's current state, Shiro's face wasn't difficult to understand. It was a mixture of panic and terror, of reliving harsh memories on top of the physical pain. Lance tried to force himself to move, he reached for his bayard, but even as he started to summon it he felt his energy sapped away and the world receding.

He fought it, as hard as he could, but in the end he succumbed again.

It was like being stuck in quicksand, the more he struggled the farther down he was pulled. He was desperate to get out of here, desperate to make his brain function. Shiro needed help, the castle needed defending, the team needed all of its Paladins and he was probably the only one who wasn't doing anything at all.

Lance was very aware that he was a failure, that he probably didn't belong here. He knew, deep down, that he didn't really have what it took to be a Paladin. Not like the others, who were all brave and gifted in their own ways, he was just the uninformed idiot who had ended up getting everyone stuck here in the first place.

But Shiro was in trouble, and now he could hear Pidge struggling.

He fought harder, pushing back against the dizziness of a weary brain, trying to focus through his now obvious head injury. He sucked in a full breath, then two, forced air to start moving through lungs that didn't want to properly circulate it. He opened his eyes and tried to understand what was going on.

Keith and Allura were standing in the far doorway. Shiro was kneeling next to him, looking that much worse for wear. And Pidge...Pidge was hanging several feet off the floor, Sendak holding him up with that creepy fake arm of his and threatening to break his neck if the others didn't stand back.

Keith was ready, but he couldn't get a good shot with Pidge in the way. Allura didn't even seem to be armed, and Hunk wasn't anywhere to be seen. Sendak moved and Pidge made a choking noise, and Lance felt a surge of anger. He forced his arm to move, to summon his bayard and bring up his gun.

_Nobody messes with this fighter pilot's crew, you furry jackass._

He got off a shot, hit Sendak between the shoulder blades. Pidge fell, free, and then Keith moved in. Lance wanted to fire another shot but his arms wouldn't support the gun, it fell down to the floor and he felt himself sink back against the console behind him.

There was more noise. Lance's lungs were trying to deflate again, drop him back into that state of air-deprived delirium. He fought back, trying to will his body to listen to him instead of its injuries, forcing his eyes open again and making himself sit up. There was a flash and a force field went up around Sendak, and he went absolutely berserk trying to break himself out of it until Allura dropped the oxygen levels inside of the shield and made him pass out.

Lance still had no idea what was actually going on. He had the vague notion that something had made him hurt very much, and then their party had been crashed by some Galra. Now the Galra problem seemed to be under control, but everything was still weirdly dark and purple. Not like the usual blue light that filled the Castle.

"Lance, are you okay?"

Lance was pulled out of his reverie as Keith appeared, dropping down to crouch beside him. He felt an arm go around him and he was helped to shift forward onto one knee, a blessed change of position after lying limp on the floor for so long. His balance was gone though, so he gripped the other offered hand as he looked around at the mess from his new vantage point. Pidge was cutting Shiro loose, and Sendak was lying unconscious behind the force field.

And though he couldn't remember exactly how, Lance was still sure he'd been involved somehow.

"We did it," he smiled tiredly, too achy and exhausted to pull up the joker facade and say something sarcastic. Too tired, and too relieved that everyone seemed to be alive and well. "We are a good team."

Keith actually smiled, which was kind of nice to see. Lance wanted to tell him that, to let him know he should smile more often, but all that came out was a breathless sound of pain as he found himself pitching forward.

"Lance?" He heard Keith call his name and felt himself caught before he hit the floor. "He's getting worse!"

"Coran called in, they're almost here with the new crystal!" Allura's voice. "Get him to the infirmary and into a patient uniform in the meantime! The Galra crystal probably isn't getting much power to the healing pods, but be ready to get him into one as soon as Hunk and Coran arrive!"

He was shifted around, laid on the floor. Somebody was ripping off his armor, he could hear it being thrown haphazardly around the room as it hit the floor and bounced. He was lifted, thankfully not tossed over anyone's shoulder this time, and carried. The arms holding him were soft and the chest he rested against pliant, someone else had removed their own armor as well.

"What if he doesn't make it?"

Lance had never heard Keith sound scared, so he wasn't sure if that was what he was hearing now. He opened his eyes a little, found they were in the elevator on the way down. It was Shiro who was holding him, Keith standing beside them.

"He will."

"He's not breathing right, and he coughed up blood. What if his lungs are too messed up to fix and he doesn't come out of it?"

There was a moment of silence, then Lance felt Shiro sigh.

"Then...when Allura's not looking, we saw off Sendak's other three limbs while he's still conscious and pitch all of his pieces off the bridge."

Lance wanted to speak to assure everyone that he would be fine, whether they wanted him to be or not, but he just didn't have the energy. All he'd done was fire a gun and sit up, but he felt like he'd run a marathon. When they reached the infirmary he felt himself passed to Keith, who lowered him to the floor and knelt next to him.

The room was visible to Lance while he lay there, cradled against Keith while Shiro went to the cabinet at the far wall. Lance thought he felt a hand smoothing back his hair just before the older pilot returned with some kind of uniform and the two of them started stripping him of his under armor.

It wasn't the first time he'd had to wear hospital attire, but if he could have made the choice himself these were the last two people he really wanted to be changing his clothes. He wasn't really a body shy person so he couldn't explain why, he just felt...embarrassed. It was a great relief when it was over and done with and Shiro disappeared again to start readying a pod.

Lance wasn't really in a hurry. He was lying on the floor again, leaning back against Keith's chest. It was a comfortable place to be in a moment when he felt like literal hell, and he finally gave in and let himself drift off from the waking world.

* * * * * * * * * *

**_Two days ago_** :

Lansar's grip on his gun tightened, his finger squeezing the trigger. Kogane still wasn't moving to attack him, wasn't moving to defend himself. He just lay there, resigned to his fate, eyes closed so he didn't see it coming.

He was genuinely going to let himself be killed rather than kill first.

Lansar's trigger finger faltered. He hated this, he didn't _want_ to kill anyone. He would defend himself with lethal force if necessary, but he had no desire to take lives. At least with Shirogane it had been a full on fight, he had been defecting attacks and his offensive was defensive. But this...

This was not that.

Lansar had a faint awareness that he had lain on the cold metal floor of a ship with Kogane before, here on Arus no less. He didn't have a clear memory but he knew it hadn't been hostile. Regardless of what Honerva told him about switching loyalties, Lansar knew there was no way the entirety of his time on the human side had been bad. And he knew, deep down, that some of the times with this particular man had even been very good.

That was why he needed Kogane to fight back. Lansar needed him to attack first, he needed a reason to pull the trigger. He needed his life to be in danger, he needed to look back at this moment in the future and be able to tell himself he hadn't had a choice.

But there was no attack coming, and the choice was entirely his.

He released the trigger, throwing the gun aside with a frustrated growl and launching himself to his feet. Without looking back Lansar pounded up the stairs, following that faint sense that told him Ariella and Romelle were nearby as a guide to get back to the Lion hangar. Once he was out of the stairwell and in the familiar hallway leading to the engine room he ignored everything else and ran, intent on getting away.

On escaping the Atlas, and escaping the very disturbing feeling of holding someone's life in his hands.

* * * * * * * * * *

**_Current day_** :

The dream was vivid in the moment, as dreams often were, but faded quickly as soon as consciousness returned until there were no traces of it left.

When Lansar opened his eyes, he was sitting in a chair. It took him a moment to get his bearings and realize he was in Honerva's war room, sitting in front of her desk. She was seated there, writing something in what looked like a leather-bound book, with her druids at their posts behind her. Lansar had the impression that his hair was slightly damp, as if he'd just recently gotten out of the shower before coming here. He was wearing a set of clothes he was pretty sure was different than what he'd worn this morning, but he couldn't remember how he'd come to get them.

"Feel better?" Honerva stopped writing and looked up at him.

"I'm sorry?"

"You blacked out," she informed him. "I called you here for a meeting and you had an episode just outside the door. It's been nearly a varga."

Lansar tried to think back that far. He'd been sitting in the common area with the kids, then had gotten restless. He'd gotten up and left the room. To...get a shower? That's what it looked like. Then got a call to come down here, apparently. So now he was also having blackouts, that was ridiculously embarrassing.

"We still don't know what the quintessence field can do to the brain," Honerva seemed to read his thoughts, as she always did. "It's possible you'll still encounter different effects for a while. But now that you're awake I have some things to discuss. Just one quick thing before we begin, however…Anya?”

Anya came forward as Lansar sat, carrying a tablet in her hands. He sat still as she stuck a small monitor on one of his temples, her eyes glued to whatever readings it was feeding to the device. It took a little more than a dobosh before she looked up at Honerva and nodded, wordlessly removing the monitor from him and moving back to her spot beside Karlor.

“The Honor and Flame faction has sent a fleet to try and claim this outpost and the territory around it from the Fire of Purification,” Honerva said when Lansar turned his attention to her. “We will not be helping to defend it.”

Landar raised an eyebrow.

“Is that why we’ve been packing everything up?” He asked. “We’re trying to get out of here before they arrive?”

“The fractured Galra factions and their insignificant outposts mean nothing to us,” Honerva replied. “They’re useful places to receive shipments or to keep hangars, but other than that their continued existence isn’t important. I have informed the Honor and Flame leader that I and my druids are withdrawing support for Fire of Purification, and they have agreed to hold their attack until we’re gone. Once we leave, this outpost is theirs for the taking.”

Lansar couldn’t really dredge up any kind of sympathy for anybody here on this floating hunk of junk. This outpost was a pirate den, there wasn’t a single innocent person here. Fire of Purification was a group of sell-swords who had banded together to sate their blood lust as a group, a bunch of them being dead wasn’t exactly going to be a loss for the universe.

“Okay, so how do I help with the relocation?” Lansar asked. “And where are we relocating too?”

“A permanent home base, planetside,” Honerva replied. “Not here, out in the far edges of mapped space. I will be taking the cruiser today to transport the first of the two unfinished mechs. Upon my return we’ll load up the last of what we need from the outpost and wake Lotor from his sleep. When he’s ready to travel, the cruiser will take the second mech and the Alteans, and we’ll leave this place behind. You will pilot Sincline as an active guard of the ship while Lotor is aboard during that trip.

“In exchange for not being in their way, Honor and Flame has also agreed to supply us with several parts for the mechs that we’ve been unable to acquire elsewhere,” Honerva added. “While I’m away on the first phase, I want you to take some of the older alchemists to the Honor outpost in the Tenuvian system and bring those back.”

Busy work. He was being sent to run errands while she was away, not that Lansar really minded. At least he’d get to see something besides the walls of the arena hub’s residential level.

“How long do you expect to be gone?” He asked.

“No more than two quintants. It will take us one more to ready everything from there and leave the outpost behind. Your trade trip should take you a quintant at most, just remember to be subtle.”

He knew she meant that he shouldn’t let any of the Galra see he was Altean. The Galra had actively searched them out and slaughtered them wherever they could, and although the mass assumption was that they were extinct, small pockets of Alteans or their descendants had been uncovered and massacred in the past.

“I’ll get there and back as quick as I can,” he promised. “And start making sure everything is ready for us to leave once I get back.”

“As always, your service is appreciated,” Honerva answered, giving a gentle wave of her hand to dismiss him. “Vrepit sa.”

“Vrepit sa,” Lansar bowed his head slightly as he rose and took his leave. It was somewhat ironic that they used the salute of their oppressors, as if they could claim the words for their own. Less than fifty Alteans against a universe filled with Galra, what kind of killing strike could they really manage? 

He didn’t make the walk back down the hall alone, there was someone waiting for him outside of Honerva’s open door. Romelle leaned against the wall there, looking a mixture of worried and angry.

“I’m not the one that put that on you, you can stop glaring at me,” he told her as she fell into step beside him. He assumed from her expression she was still mad at the collar they made her wear that stopped her from leaving the residential level.

“You don’t remember anything about today, do you?” She asked quietly. “Do you even know you were just tested? That monitor system was used by Lotor to test Alteans to see if they were strong enough for him to use.”

“Cool,” Lansar answered without slowing down. He had no idea what she was talking about, but he’d humor her. “Think I passed?”

“This is serious Lance,” Romelle said forcefully, moving ahead of him and throwing up her arms to block him from continuing. “If she can, she’ll use you just like they used Ariella. Just like she’s using everyone here. You were breaking out of it before, you have to keep trying to break out of it now.”

“I know,” Lansar answered, gently moving her out of his way. “It may constantly surprise a lot of people, but I do occasionally know what’s going on around me. Don’t worry about me, just try to relax and enjoy the admittedly limited hospitality.”

“But—“

“Hey, I’m heading over to the Tenuvian system,” Lansar cut her off before she could press any further. “Want me to pick you up something while I’m there? Something shiny, maybe? Something sweet?”

“You’re not going to shut me up by offering me presents,” Romelle protested.

“No, I was offering you presents to be nice,” Lansar answered as they reached the elevator and it opened, letting him step in. “I’m going to shut you up by closing a door in your face.”

He gave her a charming smile as the elevator door slid closed, cutting her pretty glare from view.

Up in the lab he called for Haran, ordering him to get together some of Honerva’s Galra guards and prepare a shuttle for them to leave. Then he called Natille and told her to pick out two of her best druids to accompany them all on the trip.

It would take some time, it always did. One of the most boring things about travel was the actual travel itself, the small eternity it took for everyone to get on the same page and be prepared to go. While he was waiting he went to change into something more suited for space travel, and found Haran in the armory. He was already wearing Galra armor, standing a good foot taller than he had been earlier and bearing a distinct purple coloring to his skin.

Here was where things were about to get embarrassing. Lansar could change his colors like the others, but he had not been able to shift his size or anything about his shape. His ears were a dead giveaway to the human half of his heritage and he was visibly smaller than any Galra of the same age. All he could do was shift his skin to a purple tint, let the red markings fade into dark purple stripes and his hair shift to a deep purple shade. When he was changed he presented himself to Haran and Natille, who had come to join them.

“Well?” He asked. “Do I look like a half Galra, at least?”

“You look like it’s Take Your Kid To Work Day at the Galran pirate outpost,” Natille answered. “I’ve seen more intimidating things at a petting zoo.”

“We’ll tell people you’re my little half-brother,” Haran grinned, resting a hand on top of Lansar’s head. “From the side of the family we don’t talk about.”

They all donned cloaks, Lansar pulling his hood up to cover his ears as they went down a level and joined a handful of the Galra soldiers who still served who they thought was the Galran witch Haggar in Lotor’s name. They all seemed used to being in the presence of halfbloods, barely casting Lansar a glance as they boarded the prepped shuttle. Even so, he separated himself from the others once the trip was under way, sitting back in a corner of the hold behind a stack of crates intended for the parts they were picking up.

It would be several hours out to the Tenuvian system, at least, so he settled in for a quiet ride. Alone, for the most part, with his thoughts. Eventually his mind turned to things he knew it shouldn't, and his suppressors started to go off to wipe the slate clean.

About two hours in he got tired of it, tired of trying to chase a thought only to have it slip through his fingers. He stole the pen from the bin holding the ship manifest paperwork and rolled up his sleeve, jotting down what he knew was a very important name just before he felt it stolen away from him again:

R E D


	3. Chapter 3

Romelle twisted the group of strings, weaving the colors into a vivid pattern. Her fingers worked from memory, the habitual motions of years spent working at the riverside with friends, but her eyes kept a careful watch of everything occurring around her.

Lance was gone, off on an errand she knew he had been sent on to make sure he was too busy to indulge in trying to remember. Honerva had finished loading up one of the incomplete mechs upstairs and had left shortly after, Romelle had learned this from Ariella when she’d joined her earlier in the common room. Honerva had taken Anya and Karlor while Haran and Natille were gone with Lance and two other older Alteans, effectively leaving Romelle the oldest person here at the outpost.

There were two children here that she knew besides Ariella, two boys. Sendor and Paylan were pleased to find her alive, and they had inadvertently told her a lot of things they didn’t even realize they knew to tell. Now she needed to get that information to people who could do something with it.

She had been sitting here in the hallway for a little over three hours, watching the comings and goings of the other Alteans. Timing how long it took for the doors to sense them and open, trying to find a workaround for the main problem that kept her from acting.

This collar. It kept her from getting too close to the exit doors or elevator, delivering a shock when she got too close. She’d tested it a bit and found the closer she got the worse the shock, and that if she moved slowly enough it beeped in warning when she started to get too near the point she shouldn’t pass.

Like Lance, she was being conditioned to behave. Honerva didn’t have to be violent to keep them in their place, she only had to set limits. This way, if Romelle or Lance did something that got themselves hurt they had only themselves to blame in the eyes of the young Alteans here. No one would help them when it looked as if they were unreasonably going against the wishes of a benevolent, maternal empress.

One of the younger kids left her quarters and headed for the doorway to go upstairs. Romelle watched her go, made note of where she stood when the door opened. When she was gone Romelle finally set aside her weaving and rose, approaching the exit.

She had a basic idea of the point a person had to be at before the door sensed them and opened. She knew when that happened because the light next to the door flashed just before it slid to the side, and always when someone reached the same spot. Romelle stopped a few feet short of that spot, and then slowly began to edge forward.

Nothing at first. She moved a few inches more, still nothing. Scooted forward a little bit more, and heard her collar beep a warning.

Romelle stopped. She knew what was coming and she already knew it wouldn’t be pleasant, but she needed to know if she was right. She took a very slow step forward, tensing in anticipation.

The light on the door turned green just as she felt the shock hit. She jumped back, letting out a string of the swears she and Allura had learned from Pidge’s brother Matt, holding her neck and stomping her foot to try and distract from the pain. She was never going to get used to that, but at least now she had what she thought was an answer.

The collar worked on the same mechanism the doors did. That was how it knew where she was and whether she was nearing somewhere she shouldn’t be, it must be pinging the door readers. What activated the collar was the same signal that opened the door when she was close enough.

Unfortunately, the doors didn’t open fast enough for her to rush through. The shock hit as soon as the door identified her standing there, it didn’t wait for the door to be open so she didn’t have the option of braving the pain and running past. And if it amped up fast enough as she got closer there was a good chance she’d be unconscious before she got through, which would likely end with her being dead if there was nobody to remove her from the signal perimeter and the shock continued.

Romelle stood by the door, eyeing the controls on the wall. The small screen with its buttons and strip of glass that was probably the sensor.

It was the sensor that was the enemy here. Perhaps if she could confuse that…

Romelle ran back down the hallway, scooping up her discarded weaving. She tossed it into her quarters as she passed and went into the kitchen, glad to see there was nobody here. There wasn’t much of use to her in this place, it seemed as if it was kept intentionally bare of anything that could somehow be useful in any kind of escape, but there was one thing she knew might be of help.

She found the metal mixing bowl in the bottom of the pantry and returned to the door. Taking a deep breath she held it out in front of her and tensed, edging forward until she heard the warning beep at her neck.

_Oh, please let this work_ , she prayed as she darted forward, slamming the bowl over the sensor by the door and waiting for the pain to hit.

Nothing happened.

She didn’t get a shock, but the door also didn’t open. That was fine, but she had to use one hand to keep the sensor covered while she struggled with the other to force the door open. It took her a minute, but finally she yanked the bowl away and ran into the exposed stairwell, feeling the first vibrations of the shock coming almost as soon as the sensor was uncovered.

Romelle went with the down side of the stairs, taking the six or seven steps at once in a leap as she felt the pain start. She hit the landing a bit roughly, fell and rolled into the wall, but could be nothing but thankful when she felt the shock die down.

At first she couldn’t believe that had worked, that she’d gotten herself free, but the victory was short lived in the face of the enormity of the task ahead of her. She had to find some kind of communications port that wouldn’t be monitored by the outpost, and it needed to be one she would be able to access. Everything within the Alteans’ little sphere of influence was under very strict control, Romelle was pretty sure only a handful of people here would have access codes to use outside communications.

She couldn’t use anything that was Honerva’s because it would likely get her caught, and she couldn’t go out into the outpost itself because Lance was right about Galra killing Alteans. Romelle was bright enough to know that left her only one very unpalatable option, but she had to do what she had to do.

She hauled herself up from the floor and went all the way down to the next level, not wanting to risk getting close to the residential floor door and having it open and give her a shock. When she stepped out into the lower level, bowl at the ready, she was pleased to find at least one thing was finally in her favor: the collar only seemed to be keyed to the residential floor. She wasn’t given a shock as she stepped out into the hallway, and when she ran down to the elevator she was able to jump in without so much as a tingle.

Romelle used the elevator to bypass the second level and go right up to the third, to where she knew from Ariella and the boys that most of the work was being done. There were a few of the older Alteans in the lab when she stepped out, but she simply dropped down and crawled down the hallway on all fours to avoid being seen through the half-windowed wall.

There was only one communication system here that Romelle knew for sure was keyed into Voltron’s comm signals, because Allura had helped to set it up that way. One system that Honerva had likely never bothered to touch, that would still be pristine and need no special access codes. One system that the Galra didn’t even know existed and wouldn’t be monitoring for.

Romelle followed what she remembered of the kids’ vague descriptions of this floor, down to the end of the hall and through a door warning that eye protection should be worn at all times. Everything was quiet in the huge hangar, one of the half-finished mechs already gone and most of the supplies for working on them having been packed up to leave.

Romelle sprinted across the open space, to where Sincline knelt in the dark.

It wasn’t an easy task to figure out how to get in, Sincline was a sleek mix of Altean and Galran design that didn’t mimic anything that had come before it. Her familiarity with things like the Atlas and the Lions was useless, she had to climb up the massive mech and poke around until she found the doors.

The Sincline had been made of three ships, she’d seen them merge together before Keith had arrived to help the others fight Lotor off. The main cockpit was sealed up tight, and so was the lower entrance for the leg portion ship that was set in the mech’s abdomen. Romelle had to find her way to the third, the entrance to the cockpit of the arm portion ship that was located on Sincline’s back.

She barely touched the door when it slid open, letting her drop down into the dark of the unfamiliar ship.

Romelle had only taken a step inside when the door slid shut behind her. Lights flickered on in the floor of the narrow cockpit, two rows guiding her forward to the pilot and copilot seats. Seats Romelle hadn’t actually expected to see there, since if she remembered correctly they had been ejected along with Lotor’s generals.

As soon as she sat down the console in front of her lit up, overlays flashing into existence and the viewscreen in front of her becoming a view of the dim hangar around her. It was a lot like being in one of the Lions, just a bit smaller and narrower, and with many of the controls having a red light that probably indicated they were unusable at the moment. Lotor’s commands to have all controls routed to his cockpit were still in effect.

But that didn’t matter to her, because she wasn’t interested in flying the thing. She was only interested in the comm lines, and those flashed up in front of her as soon as she turned them on.

Romelle went through the different lines Allura had set up, flipping through them one by one. She didn’t know what time it would be on Arus, or if everyone had somehow gotten back to Earth, or if anyone would be in their Lions. She just tried her luck, flipping through the feeds one by one.

“Hello?” She whispered loudly, even though the hangar was empty and it wasn’t like anyone could hear her in the well-sealed cockpit anyway. “Hello! Calling all Lions! Calling _any_ Lion! This is Romelle, hailing anyone!”

Red’s cockpit came up, obviously dark and empty. Blue’s was next, shut down. Green’s was also dark. Black’s cockpit was lit, but there was nobody in the seat. Yellow was—

“Hello? Rom—”

The voice came just as she switched over to Yellow, falling silent as she broke the connection to Black. She panicked, slapping buttons on the console as she tried to get it back, cycling back through Red and Blue before she finally saw Keith’s face flicker onto her screen. He was wearing his Blade uniform, the hood flipped over his shoulder askew and his hair looking a mess.

“Sorry!” She whispered. “Did I wake you up? Why are you sleeping in your Lion?”

“It’s two in the morning,” Keith whispered back. “Why wouldn’t I be sleep…”

He stopped, shaking his head as he realized there was absolutely no reason he needed to be whispering, and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. His voice was at its normal pitch when he spoke again, running his hands through his hair to tame it.

“I’m out here looking for _you_. Where are you? What happened?”

“I’m at an outpost for Sendak’s Galra faction, just like you all thought,” Romelle told him. “I can’t pinpoint it for you, but I can tell you it’s orbiting a small planet in the system of a yellow star, similar to your sun. The Galra don’t seem to know there are Alteans here, they’re just assuming this little private portion is for Haggar and her druids and leave it alone.”

“There are only a handful of yellow stars in the section Kolivan marked off. Hold on a second.”

Keith did something with his console, and after a moment a second line was patched in. Nobody was there right away, Romelle could only hear a chiming noise, but after a moment a familiar, confused face poked into view.

“Pidge!” Romelle exclaimed happily. “Why are you not asleep?”

“It’s only two in the morning,” Pidge answered, her visual shaking a bit as she picked up the laptop and brought it with her to the lab table she was working at. “Why would I be asleep?”

“Romelle is at the Fire outpost,” Keith interrupted before a discussion about human sleep habits could start. “She says it’s orbiting a yellow star, can you run the numbers on the area Kolivan gave us and see if you can trace Romelle’s signal back to one?”

“I’m not sure it will do you much good,” Romelle admitted as Pidge started furiously typing. “The outpost is about to fall to another faction, Honerva is taking everyone and leaving it behind. The Alteans here all call the planet they’re going to “Altea Beta,” but the way they describe it sounds strangely like Allura’s descriptions of Oriande.”

“You think she’s moved the colony there?” Keith asked in surprise. “But I thought only certain people could go there. Alteans with a certain amount of alchemical ability.”

“Only certain people can go there,” Romelle agreed. “And every Altean here is on that list. I saw them test Lance today, the same way Lotor used to test us. Probably to see if they could take him with them. It looked as though he passed.”

“If they take him to Oriande, we’re never breaking him out,” Pidge frowned. “Only Allura would even be able to get there.”

“Well there’s two big problems on top of that,” Romelle answered. “The first is that all of the Alteans here are able to go to Oriande. All of them. So…”

“So what happened to the Alteans like you who failed the test,” Keith finished for her. “Honerva’s only taking the gifted ones. Where are the others?”

“I’m also concerned that they’re all children,” Romelle added. “The only adults here are two creepy druids that do Honerva’s bidding. Everyone else is our age or younger, which makes sense since Lotor already took everyone gifted over eighteen every year, but that makes them very impressionable. She’s basically taken the role of a distant mother. They lap up any attention she gives them and are completely devoted to making her proud of them when she’s indifferent.”

“That complicates things,” Pidge murmured, running a hand through her hair. “Nobody wants to fight kids. What’s our other big problem?”

“Lance,” Romelle said. “I know what’s wrong with him. It was Lance that went into the quintessence field and brought Lotor out. He was overexposed, it wiped his brain clean. From what I’ve gathered from the others, Honerva and her druids helped pull his memory back, but she keeps him wearing these strange bracelets that stop most of his memories from coming back fully.”

“If he went into the quintessence field, that explains his face markings,” Pidge mused. “That kind of direct exposure might have finished the changes that were already starting. And we already know about the bracelets.”

She lifted something that she had been working on out of view of the camera, a small tray with the bracelet Keith had broken during his fight with Lance. She was currently taking it apart.

“The code in these things is like the mech, it’s written with protocols that are thousands of years old and lost a long time ago. Fortunately, we have something that has a similar code.”

Pidge held up a gold colored circlet. Romelle didn’t recognize it, but Keith did.

“Isn’t that the thing Allura used to erase your memories when we had you infiltrate Sprawl?” He asked.

“Sort of. It uploaded my memories to itself, and then I had to download them again when everything was over. But this bracelet is running on the same kind of program. Honerva obviously doesn’t want Lance to constantly be a completely blank slate, though, this thing’s code has keywords it’s programmed to kill while leaving other things intact.”

“Keith,” Romelle guessed. “Red. Shiro, Pidge, Hunk, Allura. Family members.”

“Yes, exactly,” Pidge looked surprised. “First names, nicknames, pet names, anything that marks a memory as personal.”

“He had those names written on his arms today,” Romelle frowned. “All different colors, it looked like he’d been writing on himself for days. Some of it was smudged, like he tried his best not to wash it away in the shower. But when he saw it he was shocked, like he didn’t know the writing was there.”

“He writes notes on his hands,” Keith murmured. He leaned back tiredly in his seat, resting a foot on his console. “That’s his go-to, his memory has always been bad. He’s falling back on a very Lance-like habit.”

“Oh, he’s not different,” Romelle insisted. “He’s going by another name, but he’s one hundred percent Lance. But they’re watching him, they took him away when he tried to fight the bracelets and set off some kind of alarm on them. They gave him a shock that knocked him out for a minute or so, next thing I know there are druids sweeping him away and he’s back to square one an hour later. But, I do have good news! Sort of.”

“I’ll take sort of good news over no good news,” Pidge managed a small smile.

“Lance is on a shuttle right now to the Tenuvian system, to a base belonging to a faction called Honor and Flame,” Romelle told them. “Honerva made a deal with them to let this outpost fall to their fleet in return for some parts she needs for her mechs. He’s got the Captain of Honerva’s guard and three of the oldest druids with him…all basically kids.”

That made Keith sit up straighter. He was already punching that information into his console, looking at a map.

“The Blade has a known location for Honor’s Tenuvian base,” he noted. “I’m only about two hours from there at Black’s top speed.”

“And I have Romelle’s coordinates,” Pidge said. “Which I’m transmitting to all of the Lions now. If I go get everybody right now, we can…uh oh.”

Something was beeping. Pidge’s eyes went wide in a look of shocked terror and her screen shook as she suddenly shoved away from the table.

“Pidge?” Keith called.

“Lock down lab two!” Pidge was screaming in the background, no longer in view. “Everybody get do—”

There was a bright flash of light and her connection went dead.

“What was that?” Romelle asked breathlessly. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Keith was already pulling up all of his other communication contacts, forcing his message through to phones and devices with an emergency protocol.

“Keith?” Predictably, it was Shiro who was the first to respond only a few heartbeats later. Keith patched him through, and Romelle saw he was in his quarters on the Atlas and just as sleep-mussed as Keith had been when she’d called. “What’s wrong? Romelle? Romelle! Are you all right?”

“Check on Pidge!” Keith interrupted him. “We were just talking to her and something happened, she’s in lab two!”

Shiro didn’t question it, disappearing from view as he left his quarters to check. While they waited Keith turned back to Romelle.

“Sit tight,” he advised. “I’m going after Lance, the others will come for you.”

“Nobody can come for me,” Romelle protested. “Keith, that other faction fleet is right at the borders of the territory, it will be here as soon as Honerva is gone. That’s on top of the fleet that’s already here. You can’t send three Lions in here and expect them all to get out in one piece.”

“Well we’re not going to just leave you there! Honerva isn’t going to take you with her when she leaves, Romelle.”

“It’s okay!” She insisted. “There are some kids I know here, I know I can get at least one of them to help me. My plan is to convince one of them to take me down to the planet’s surface with one of the shuttles here, then I’ll give them the slip and hide out until everything calms down. If I can’t get back to Earth on my own, I’ll contact you again when it’s safe to come get me.”

Keith had an incoming call then, and when he accepted it her screen flashed up with a view of Shiro and Pidge. Pidge’s face was scratched and bruised and her hair was singed.

“We have a problem!” She exclaimed, almost breaking into a coughing fit. “That bracelet had the same self-destruct protocol the mech did, Keith must have disconnected that control when he broke it. The thing exploded when I connected the wrong circuit. I don’t know what Honerva’s using to fuel her explosions, but this one took out all of lab two and part of lab three. If Lance is wearing two of them, he’s a walking bomb that could probably take down a whole space station himself.”

“Okay, that definitely makes it harder to go and just grab him,” Keith muttered, running a hand through his hair. “Maybe I can talk some sense into him at least, get him to let me help him. If we can get the things off before Honerva knows he’s trying to get free…”

“The lab’s a mess and my laptop’s dead, but I’ll keep working on whatever parts I can find,” Pidge promised. “We have two hours until you reach the Tenuvian system, right? Maybe I can come up with a way to scramble their signals.”

“Keep me posted,” Keith requested. “Romelle…be careful.”

“I’ll contact you all again as soon as I’m safe,” Romelle promised. “But the sooner I go, the sooner that happens. Good luck!”

She signed off and sat back in the pilot seat, looking out at the empty hangar through the ship’s viewscreen. Honerva would be gone for another day and a half or so, and Lance would probably reach the Tenuvian system shortly before Keith. Talking these kids into turning on Honerva and helping her escape was going to take some doing, and Romelle honestly wasn’t sure even a week would be long enough.

She looked for a mechanism to open the cockpit door as she approached it but found she didn't have to. As soon as she reached it the door opened on its own, and the cockpit slowly started to power down behind her.

“You’re such a nice, polite ship,” she told it, patting the inner wall before climbing out and making her way down to the floor.

She tiptoed across the hangar and back out the door she’d come through, hoping things would turn out better than she thought they would.

* * * * * * * * * *

James leaned back against a steel pillar that might have once been part of a cruiser wing, arms crossed while he impatiently waited. Across the little alley made of rows of merchant stalls, Adam was shamelessly flirting with a Galra woman who was visibly flaunting a Fire of Purification emblem on her armor, like he was physically incapable of not tempting fate for more than five minutes.

He had only known Adam previously as Captain Wolfe, a senior officer and a teacher at the Garrison who was usually fairly mature in his interactions aside from the regular slip-ups involving foul language. So James wasn’t sure if it was just the year and a half of lonely captivity that was affecting Adam’s behavior, or if he really just couldn’t stand letting something pretty walk by without a comment.

Either way, the thing that annoyed him the most about the way the older man acted was that it always worked.

It was like he had some kind of secret play book. Two sentences into a conversation and he seemed to know exactly what buttons to push to get the right reaction, exactly what words to use and the perfect time to smile to wrap people around his finger. He knew exactly when to stand at his full height and turn the masculinity up to Impressive, and when to lean against something suggestively and laugh at a joke that obviously wasn’t funny.

James was a military man from a military family, he had grown up with it instilled in him that things ran by the book. Rules and procedures were there to be followed, and that was how things got done. Nothing Adam did was by any known book in any known universe, and half of it flew in the face of common sense.

But he consistently got what he wanted, every single time, and it was driving James insane.

Adam finally finished with his conversation and came over, not even bothering to pull up his hood. He stood in the middle of the crowded commercial area with a crazy array of brightly colored pigments splashed across his face and some kind of metallic strands woven into some locks of his hair, and nobody looked at him twice. The only thing he bothered to hide was the shape of his ears, which he did by wearing one of the solid metal diadems that seemed to be in fashion with at least two different species they’d come across. It rested on his forehead but had ornamentation over the ears that hid the tops of them.

“You know,” James said irritably when Adam finally returned to his side, “since we’re probably going to die soon anyway I feel like I should be honest with you about some things. Mostly that you look ridiculous.”

“Well we both know that’s not even possible, but it’s cute that you tried,” Adam answered, pulling a tablet out of his pocket. Another annoying thing about him was that he was literally impossible to insult. “So I was just talking to Lekta and there’s a party—”

“Oh, Lekta. We’re on a first name basis with the pirates now,” James interrupted him. “You’re not going to a party.”

Adam paused, lowering the tablet to give James a look. “Sorry, did the middle of my sentence interrupt the beginning of yours? I’ll wait for you to finish.”

“That’s probably the first time that last sentence has ever come out of your mouth,” James answered. “But by all means, the floor is yours.”

“As I was saying, there’s an _advance_ party heading for the outpost from the nearest Honor cruiser, it will probably hit our airspace within the next few doboshes,” Adam continued. Yet another annoying thing about him, he was still used to speaking in alien time units. “She expects it will broadcast a demand for the outpost to surrender, at which point Fire will very impolitely decline. Then all hell is going to break loose. Lekta said Haggar’s cruiser has been gone for about half a quintant and they’re probably attacking because they think the outpost is weak without her here.”

“We’ve been watching that cruiser, they’ve only taken one of those unfinished mechs so far,” James frowned. “So we know she’s coming back. What makes them think she isn’t?”

“I don’t think they care if she is. Apparently the planet below has a mine with a gemstone that’s stupidly rare, every day they hold off attacking is another day Fire mines millions of GAC worth of stones from it. We’re basically in the middle of a blood diamond war.”

“That explains why she picked this pile of junk as her temporary base,” James supposed. “I’m guessing she’s had her own miners down there and plenty of that money has been going into her pockets for her projects. This faction still controls Galra’s central command, she could be working from there, but I guess building giant robots and rebuilding ancient Altean tech can’t be cheap.”

An alarm went off, a siren that echoed through the dome of Hub Five’s commercial district. Everyone around them sprang into action, non-native merchants locking up their stalls while Fire of Purification members moved toward the perimeter to prepare to arm defenses. Adam tucked his tablet back away.

“Sounds like they’re playing our song.”

“Finally,” James muttered. “The cable packages here are shit.”

They turned and walked back toward the inn, quickly and with purpose but without breaking into a run. Around them people were panicking, locking things up to try and ride out the coming battle in the hopes that the current faction would fight off the intruders. And maybe they would, but he and Adam didn’t intend to be here at the end of the fight to find out.

Back at the room they each grabbed a bag that had been packed with today in mind, pocketing anything they didn’t want to leave behind and leaving the room for the last time. Adam locked it up and then slid the keycard under the door on the off chance the place didn’t get burned to the ground in the next few hours.

They synchronized the watches they wore and parted ways outside of the inn, pulling up their hoods and going to opposite exits. While Adam headed to the bridge connecting to Hub One, James headed for the one leading to Hub Four. He slipped his modified Galra prosthetic over his hand on his way and used it to open the first of the two sets of double doors that would take him out of public space.

They closed behind him, leaving him in silence except for the muffled sound of sirens. James was just about to the second set of doors when they opened, letting three Fire members run through on their way out to the docks that would let them get to their ships to fight. James ducked his head down but they didn’t even glance at him, and he continued on without being bothered.

He stopped just inside the walkway and opened his pack, pulling out the small, handmade explosive device and a knife, using the latter to pry up the edge of the ugly patchwork carpeting that seemed to run through all of these bridges. He lifted it just enough to set the explosive under it once it was armed, then moved on. He placed two more charges, one in the middle of the bridge and one at the other end, pausing constantly as people rushed past to prepare for the fight. When he managed to finish he moved on into Hub Four.

He slowed down to pass through it with his head down as Galra rushed back and forth around him. He held his breath, waiting for somebody to notice that he was far too small to be one of them and shouldn’t be here. But the panic was palpable, and everyone was worrying about their own skins. James honestly couldn’t believe Adam’s advice about just acting like he belonged somewhere had worked so well for so long, but he passed out to the next hallway and laid his next three charges without incident.

Through the clear polymer sections of the bridge he could see a fire fight beginning out in the distance, bright flashes of laser fire being exchanged between the Fire of Purification and the advance party. It wouldn’t be long before both fleets fully engaged.

Taking a deep breath, James carefully let himself into Hub Three. This was the arena hub, the hallway he stepped out into now had people who had been watching a recent match still fighting to get out of the entertainment area and out to where they could be useful. He fought against the tide of people to the stairs, going up to the third level where he knew the Alteans would be.

When he reached the top he tried the lock screen with his prosthetic glove. As he and Adam had guessed, he was unable to get in.

James went back the way he’d come, but this time he headed forward to the hall that would lead to Hub Two. As he slipped out onto that bridge he spotted Adam, rising from setting his last charge.

“Locked up tight,” he told the older man when he joined him. “They probably set it to let only Alteans come and go as soon as the siren went off. There’s no way up there. What’s Plan B?”

“Oh, no, we’re still on Plan A,” Adam answered. “There’s just no way up there from _inside_.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” James admitted as Adam nudged him forward.

He let himself be guided back into Hub Three, past the panicking people and down a short, dead-end hallway where there was a water fountain and a maintenance closet. Adam made sure nobody was looking and opened the closet, dragging James inside.

“Hold this,” Adam told him, shoving his bag into James’ hands. He then used the shelves as a ladder, climbing up them like a kid to reach the air vent overhead.

“Please tell me you’re not suggesting we go through the air vents,” James groaned.

Adam looked down at him, smiling amiably as he pulled something out of the vent and dropped it down into James’ arms.

“I’m not suggesting we go through the air vents.”

* * * * * * * * * *

“Okay, maybe we should just try to go through the air vents,” James begged.

Adam kept walking, leaving James to give in and follow, letting himself be swept up by the finally dwindling crowds that were leaving the arena. He kept his hood up as he went, only deviating from the crowd as they passed the office where the night guards usually hid to play cards. Once James followed him in he closed the door, casting aside the cloak once they were alone.

“You just got done saying the air vents would take too long, and explaining to me that they probably aren’t wide enough all the way through anyway,” Adam answered as he locked the door. The room had a desk and some file cabinets, and most importantly, a polymer window at the far side. “Besides, we’ve already been over this plan.”

“No, no we haven’t!” James exclaimed, yanking off his own hood. “We’ve been over _a_ plan, this is not _that_ plan! This isn’t a plan at all! I don’t even know what this is, it’s just…it’s just…it’s a random mish mash of stupidity with no rhyme or reason!”

“No rhyme or reason is good,” Adam said soothingly, resting a hand on James’ shoulder. “Look, if we don’t know what we’re doing, then neither does anybody else.”

“Are you actually talking to me, or are you just spitting out random words that you think should make some kind of sense?” James asked. “How are we even getting there? The air locks are back at the other hubs!”

Adam, for his part, was completely confident. Either everything was going to work out perfectly or everyone was going to die, but if the latter happened it would be quick and they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Fortune favored the brave, and quite frankly, if James was ever going to become the kind of soldier who would be able to think on his feet in all situations then he needed to learn that now.

“James,” Adam said somberly, resting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Do you remember when I told you never to use a blaster inside of this floating piece of shit because it’s unstable?”

“Vividly,” James answered.

Adam smiled, and James understood just a second too late to do anything. Adam reached up to snap down the screens of the flight suits he’d had hidden in the air shaft, first James’ then his own, then pulled out the blaster tucked into his belt and fired repeatedly at the office window.

He didn’t fight the sudden vacuum, letting himself be pulled out of the hub and into open space. As soon as he was clear of the walls he fired the flight suits boosters, steering himself up out of the airflow to grab the uneven surface of the makeshift outpost and start guiding himself along the outside toward the arena hub.

James was screaming like a little girl over the comm, and he glanced back to see him cartwheeling away from the outpost.

“Stop playing around and use your boosters,” Adam hissed. “Seriously, what kind of space explorer are you? We only have about twenty doboshes before the radiation exposure out here is too much!”

“Radiation?” James groaned, sounding dizzy and ill as he finally managed to get his boosters to fire. He finally started to make his way back toward Adam, with admittedly terrible aim, and Adam had to grab him by the foot as he overshot the outpost surface by almost a yard. “What kind of radiation?”

“You’re in space,” Adam said flatly, yanking him down. Once James had a grip on the metal he let him go, and started pulling himself along again. “Usually the atmosphere of a planet protects you from the sun. The sun, which is going to rise here soon and hit you with all of that radiation that isn’t being blocked by an atmosphere or the outpost.”

“You know what? I don’t think you thought this through at all,” James accused.

“I thought it through,” Adam defended. “I just didn’t discuss it with you, because I knew that you’d say no. I don’t like no.”

For as terrifying as it probably all was to James, Adam felt his reasoning was sound enough. They needed to get up to where Lance would be, which was currently locked down to anyone except Alteans. Obviously they couldn’t get through from the inside—something Adam had foreseen—so they had to go through different channels. The kind that nobody would secure against, because nobody would be insane enough to try them.

Now was the time they had to do it. Everyone was busy preparing for the upcoming fight, but the beginnings of the battle were still miles away. Visible, but not close enough to be a danger yet. In fact, as imminent as bloodshed seemed to be Adam did know a little bit about space and about wars. An advance party was called an advance party because the rest of the fleet wasn’t close enough to do anything yet, and the current fighting was only visible because there was nothing to block or bend the light for quite some distance.

They had time. Not a lot, but some. Adam was not in a terrible hurry as he pulled himself along, letting his momentum carry him above the surface of the outpost and giving himself a push here and there to guide direction. He was kind of scared, but only as scared as he ever was when going into a fight.

He reached the arena hub, gently stopping himself before he slammed into the wall. Next to him James tried to do the same but only managed to flip himself over so he hit it backwards and upside down, bouncing off with a groan and a curse. Adam ignored him, using his boosters to glide up along the side of the hub and scanning the walls.

They weren’t smooth, or clean. When he’d said this place was put together from spare parts he meant it literally, the ring of hubs was basically a ship graveyard with the remains of cruisers and strikers attached together to form outer walls and then built up from the inside. The only things that weren’t complete scrap where hangar doors and airlocks, which had to be relatively new to function properly.

He found what he was looking for after about five minutes, the outline of the door of one of the ships used in the wall. Since it was a ship door it had simply been closed up with its pre-existing seal and luckily not welded, and with a bit of fighting Adam managed to get it open. There was no rush of air escaping, but he hadn’t expected there to be any. What he found was just what he expected to find, a hollow space between the junk layer, which acted as a shield against space debris impacts, and the inner layer, where the hubs were built in.

It was pitch black inside, but Adam’s night vision kicked in as soon as he pulled himself in. He waited for James to join him then pulled the door closed, turning on his helmet light to get a look at the mess they were in. There was no straight shot anywhere. Supports between the inner and outer layers were added seemingly at random, sometimes full ship hallways and sometimes just multiple pillars installed in open spaces.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen horror movies that started this way,” James murmured, his own light sweeping the technological graveyard. Dead wires hung loose from panels and broken bits of metal floated in the void.

“This might end that way,” Adam admitted. “The outer hulls will protect against some of the radiation, but will only buy us a little bit of time. Come on.”

He started heading up, weaving through the masses of tangled steel. He tried to keep them on a fairly straight course but that was impossible, at some points the only places wide enough for them to fit went on an angle or even down and then up again. There was no gravity to tell him which way he was going so he tried to keep track of any changes in direction by keeping them to a minimum.

Just when he was starting to think they might actually be lost, they hit a section of smooth, solid wall. This metal was new, cut specifically to be placed here, a different color and quality from the ship metal around it.

“Do you think there’s an airlock on the other side of that?” James asked.

“I’m hoping so,” Adam answered, looking up and down. The wall was continuous as far as he could see in the dark. “I think this might be the bigger airlock, the one we saw Sincline come through. We’re almost there.”

He headed up again, and before long they reached a point where they couldn’t go any farther. They had reached the top of the hub, and now there was only a very narrow expanse that would let them continue forward, taking them over the top of the airlock. Which was exactly where a maintenance hatch would be…and was.

“Score,” Adam chirped when his prosthetic glove worked on the lock screen.

The hatch let them down into the space above the airlock, but not into the hub itself. Adam felt gravity kick in as they dropped into the maintenance shaft, quickly closing the hatch behind them to stop what air pressure was here from changing.

“Keep your helmet closed,” he advised. “Air pressure is probably evened out here, but they won’t be pumping a lot of oxygen into maintenance shafts.”

“Do I still have to worry about radiation?” James asked, immediately closing his open helmet back up.

“Only if you want to have kids someday,” Adam answered. He wasn’t sure why he said it, mostly just to be an ass. They were perfectly safe at this point, but it never hurt to put the fear of God into a younger generation.

The shaft narrowed to a thin, low hallway once they were no longer over the airlock, and clearly had never been used for actual maintenance. They followed it until they reached another hatch in the floor and Adam pried it open, filling the shaft with light as a hallway below came into view. He held it open, stepping to the side.

“After you.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” James muttered, dropping down into the hallway. He had no sooner disappeared from view than Adam heard a woman scream.

Looking down, he found a blonde Altean holding James in her arms exactly how she’d just caught him. She didn’t look terribly dangerous and she seemed to be alone, so Adam quickly dropped down into the hallway as well and let the hatch closed so air wouldn’t continue to escape.

“Romelle!?” James seemed to recognize the woman, flipping his helmet open. “Romelle! It’s me!”

The woman—Romelle—stopped screaming and looked confused. “James?”

“Uh, Adam,” Adam said helpfully, pulling off his helmet. Romelle was cute, he gave her a smile. “Hello there.”

“No,” James said immediately, shoving a hand in Adam’s face. “This one’s ours, don’t do that.”

“What are you doing here?” Romelle asked breathlessly, looking between them. “How did you get in here?”

“What are _you_ doing here?” James returned. “And can you put me down? This is a little bit awkward.”

Adam swept his gaze up and down the hallway, finding nobody else within view. Further up the wall became half window, and he crept over to peek in and see what was going on in the lab. There were a few Alteans there, all of them looking fairly young and all of them looking like they didn’t know what to do.

“I’m here because I got kidnapped with McClain,” James was saying. “We escaped, we’ve been waiting for a chance to come back here and grab him then leave. There’s a rival faction getting ready to attack the outpost, we’re using that as a distraction to do it.”

Adam watched as the young Alteans filtered out of the lab, ducking down as they headed for the elevator. One of the younger ones was crying and the rest were trying to comfort her, they didn’t even glance back to notice anyone was here. When they were gone Adam got up and made his way down to the lab door, testing his glove. It didn’t work.

“Well I’m here because Lance attacked and disabled the Atlas,” Romelle answered. “He was taking Alteans with him so I came along to see if I could help him. He’s not even here right now, he’s on a trade job for Honerva. She’s gone too. They’re both supposed to be back _before_ the other faction attacks, she has a deal with them.”

“Hey! Not to interrupt, but can you come see if you can open this?” He called back to the others.

They came down to join him and Romelle gave it a try. It opened for her, letting them into the lab. Adam immediately started taking stock of everything. There was a shuttle docked at one of the airlocks…perfect.

“I hate to be the one to point it out, but I think Honerva got double crossed,” James stated. “They’re not waiting for her to get back, they’ll probably reach us in…what, Adam? An hour or two?”

“About a varga and a half,” Adam answered absently, wandering over to inspect the glowing tube that held the source of all their troubles.

So this was Lotor. He had skin the color of a Galra, but otherwise didn’t look like one. He looked more like the Alteans here than anything, though somewhere in between the two species height-wise. And Lance was right, his hair was terrible. Nobody with any kind of survival instinct wore hair that long in environments where it could float around and get caught in things.

“Luckily, Keith should have Lance soon,” Romelle was saying. “I spoke to him earlier, he was on his way to the base where Lance was headed. If he can grab Lance and we can get out of here, before the fighting starts, one of the Lions can come get us.”

“Hey guys,” Adam called, waving to get their attention. “I know we’re getting ready to leave and all, but I’m going to make a little tweak to the plan.”

“We’re not even going by a plan!” James exclaimed. He really was kind of excitable today. “We haven’t followed an actual plan since…ever! What kind of tweak can you make to a plan that doesn’t even exist?”

Adam gave them his most charming smile, pointing back to the pod behind him with his thumb.

“We’re gonna piss off everybody who started all this by stealing the dead guy.”


	4. Chapter 4

_**Current day**_ : 

The clock was ticking, and there was nothing Shiro could do.

He had locations for Romelle and Lance, he had a handful of Paladins and Lions, he had one of the most powerful warships in the galaxy, and there was literally nothing he could do.

All the firepower in the universe wasn’t going to help Lance, who they now knew had to be handled with delicacy thanks to being wired with enough explosives to take out a whole base. Keith was going in after him alone, which did absolutely nothing to put Shiro at ease because there wasn’t a person alive and sober who would ever dare to use “Keith” and “delicate” in the same sentence.

Romelle was too far in enemy space to go in after since she was in the middle of a growing war zone, showing up with the cavalry would likely make things even worse for her. If the Atlas or Lions showed up at a faction outpost while a fight was in progress, every Galra ship within six star systems would be showing up and burning the entire area down.

There was still no word on whether James was even alive, or what was going on with Lotor, or what Haggar was doing with Sincline. They now knew she was building an army of alchemists, and the only one they had on their own team was Allura.

It was like the higher in rank Shiro went, the more illusory his power became. As a pilot he had been able to go out and physically fight, help move plans along. As a Commander all he could do was sit around and wait.

He sat across the lab table from Pidge, still exactly as he’d come running in just his sweatpants and a t-shirt. His chin was resting on his good hand, his prosthetic still off in Allura’s lab being worked on. He was watching the youngest Paladin work, Matt’s glasses shoved up into her hair like a headband and her face still streaked with some blood from her scratches. Next to them, the laptop Shiro had fetched from his room lit up as a call came in.

“Keith!” Pidge answered, barely looking up from what she’s doing. “Are you there already?”

“Just arriving,” Keith answered. “So are Rolo and Nyma. I’m about to ditch Black on a moon and head on to the base with them under cover of selling some black market weapons. It’s probably going to take another hour before we even land. Were you able to find anything?”

“Not much,” Pidge admitted. “I’m sorry, there’s just not many pieces left after the explosion. All I really have to go by is the code and whatever notes I took before the bracelet was lost. It looks like they transmit an alert every time they have to activate to suppress a memory, sort of like a record log, so I’m guessing they do the same thing if they have to shock Lance into submission. If that happens too many times while there are no druids nearby to rein him in, that might make Honerva just decide to detonate them.”

“So if I have to take desperate measures and try to get them off, I need to find a way to stop them from transmitting that,” Keith repeated to make sure he understood. “And I have to find a way to get them off that somehow damages them in the same way I accidentally damaged the first one, so I don’t set off any explosions. All while keeping him from trying to kill me. Gee, and I thought this was going to be complicated.”

“Just try to remember it’s Lance,” Shiro advised. “We all know him. He acts without thinking sometimes but he’s never been unreasonable when we talked to him. If his personality is still intact there’s no reason that shouldn’t be the case now.”

“Try not to use first names,” Pidge suggested. “Refer to everyone by surnames or titles…Commander Shirogane, Garrett, Holt. Call Allura “the Princess.” Don’t refer to anyone in the way Lance would usually refer to them, all those personal terms are what set off the bracelets. If you can help him connect memories to identities that aren’t being filtered he might be able to hold onto them longer.”

“He doesn’t seem to want to hurt anyone who’s not threatening him in some way,” Shiro added. “But be careful anyway. According to Allura, he might be unconsciously using unfiltered alchemy. Scare him and he might accidentally hurt himself and you.”

“Yeah, great, no pressure,” Keith sighed, rubbing his face. Shiro could already see the frustration starting to build, the stress of knowing the outcome of this could be good or bad depending entirely on his nonexistent social skills.

“Hey,” Shiro said gently, tapping the laptop camera to get Keith to look at him. “It’s going to be okay. You’ve talked to him before without picking a fight, you can do it now. Pretend you’re on a date.”

Keith gave a huff and glanced to the side as he had another notification come in on his console.

“That’s Rolo and Nyma. I gotta go. I’ll contact you when I’m back in my Lion, let me know if anyone hears from Romelle.”

The call ended. Pidge pursed her lips.

“Do you honestly think a date between Keith and Lance wouldn’t involve picking a fight? Their idea of bonding time is probably punching each other in the face. That was terrible advice.”

“I know,” Shiro groaned, letting his head fall forward against the lab table with a soft ‘thunk.’ “That whole planet is going to explode.”

Pidge sighed and went back to work, sifting through code and trying to find some hint as to how she might remotely shut down Lance’s bracelets. Eventually Shiro lifted his head and pulled his laptop over, bringing up the inventory of things they’d found on Sendak’s ship in case something there might somehow be of use.

Everything was quiet, until the door to Lab Four opened to admit Veronica and Allura. They had both been sleeping in the break room down the hall from Lab Two and had gotten a good scare by the explosion, and had returned to working once they were sure everyone was all right. After showers, it seemed, they were the only two Shiro had seen so far who actually looked awake and dressed.

“Any luck?” Allura asked, pulling out a chair at the table and offering Pidge a flash drive. “I pulled all the code I could find on the mnemonic circlet, but I’m afraid it’s not much more than you already have.”

“Every little bit helps,” Pidge said thankfully, loading up the new information. “We didn’t find much, just that the bracelets send a signal every time they do something. I’m trying to find what frequency or channel they’re using to see if we can disrupt it, or use it to send our own commands.”

“Keith is in the Tenuvian system,” Shiro told Veronica. She deserved to know what was going on with her brother. “He’ll be planet-side in another hour or two. All we can do now is wait to see if he manages to talk to Lance.”

Veronica nodded, looking tired. She had obviously hit her maximum point of worry, new information regarding Lance did little to faze her anymore. She opened a folder she had been carrying and pulled some papers out, laying them out in front of her.

“I was trying to keep busy, so I went through that box of papers from Sendak’s bridge for you. Krolia helped with translations from Galra,” she said. She paused to look up at him, casting a glance at Pidge and Allura before looking back at him questioningly.

“Go ahead,” he allowed. Veronica was trying to be discrete and he appreciated it, but he trusted everyone here. “I’m not going to keep secrets from the team.”

She nodded and pulled two pages out, sliding one across to him.

“Whoever worked at that desk where the picture was found was a gambler. He made a bet on an arena match a week after Sendak invaded Earth and he kept this message chain as his receipt.”

“ _They’re sending over a new addition_ ,” Shiro read Krolia’s handwritten translation from the margins of the page. “ _Sendak’s personal orders. Put me down for 300 GAC on his first fight._ The response looks like it’s about five days later, _first match is tomorrow, you’re down for 300. Two dead guards last night, you might want to raise your bet._ ”

“He answers that he does,” Veronica read from the second page, which she still had. “He raised his bet to 1,000 GAC. The last response is _you’re down for 1,000 on Cozakul._ ”

“Cozakul,” Shiro repeated, confused. “Is that a name?”

“From the context, it sounds like what they’re calling the prisoner,” Veronica answered. “Krolia says in arena circles they strip prisoners of everything including their names, give them numbers or flashy pet names the crowds will like.”

“Like Champion,” Allura said darkly.

“It doesn’t really have a direct translation,” Veronica admitted. “She said it’s a Galra word for a kind of storm that some planets have, one that rolls in without warning, does massive damage, and then dissipates just as fast. Something like “tempest” in English. It’s the kind of showy name you get if they think you’re going to last long enough to make them money. And Cozakul made some of Sendak’s crew a lot of money.”

Shiro remembered vividly the arena, the spectators excited not only for bloodshed but for their chosen contenders to win them decent returns on their money. He could recall being told more than once by an overexcited prison guard that he was worth his weight in gold. But his wins in the arena had also been what had caught Haggar’s eye and led to him being subjected to worse, he wondered if Cozakul had suffered the same fate.

“There’s not really a lot in here that’s specific, but I searched the records we do have for “Cozakul” and there is some information,” Veronica was saying, flipping through pages. “Slaves and prisoners aren’t exactly the kind of thing a cruiser crew keeps tabs on, but this one was of personal interest to Sendak. He was kept at a Fire outpost—doesn’t say where—but Sendak personally sent him to a match at Central Command to settle a bet. He got a message back a few days later saying his fighter had won but was badly damaged, and would be sent back to the outpost when he recovered if he survived.”

“If he survived,” Shiro repeated, his stomach dropping.

“Badly damaged?” Pidge looked horrified. “They talk like these are machines and not people.”

“That’s all they are to the worst of the Galra, property,” Allura said softly. Shiro saw her looking at him in a way he didn’t like, a sort of pity that said she didn’t know what was going on here but that she could tell it cut him deeply. He wished he was better at hiding his feelings. “Was he ever returned to the outpost?”

“We don’t know,” Veronica answered. “This message came the day before Sendak was killed. Any further communications would have been sent to Throk.”

“Central Command is the main Galra hub. What are the odds some specialty channel broadcast that fight?” Shiro asked.

“It doesn’t matter, I’m not going to find that for you.”

“Veronica—”

“No,” Veronica insisted. “I am not going to help you watch what sounds like a video of this guy getting mauled. If video does come up in the search, somebody else will watch it and let you know if it’s him.”

Shiro didn’t argue. Partly because he knew Veronica wouldn’t give in, but partly because he didn’t need her to. The Galra ran half of the known universe, all connected the same way Earth was connected by its internet. Most non-military information flowed freely out there to any citizen who had the right service to access it.

Figuratively speaking, all Shiro needed to do was ask Kolivan for his wifi password.

He also knew that Veronica didn’t withhold anything lightly. Which meant she had a compelling reason to believe he shouldn’t personally be looking into this Cozakul.

“What else did you find?” He prompted. “And try to remember I’m a grown man and I don’t need you to tiptoe around my emotions.”

“You’re adorable,” Veronica answered dryly. “Completely wrong, but adorable. And yeah, Colleen and I did some digging and some asking around. When the Galra were first taken out and Earth was getting back to normal, the soldiers put on the new war memorial didn’t have recorded graves because everything hadn’t been matched up yet in the chaos. As of three weeks ago, however, everybody on the list of the dead has been found, recorded, and any family they still have informed. Except for two.”

She pulled Shiro’s laptop over and logged into her own cloud storage, downloading some things that had been emailed to her by the Veteran Records department.

“Jonathan MacMillan, a ground soldier who went missing on an intel gathering op in deep Galra territory. Presumed dead until last month when a hospital in Colorado finished running fingerprint searches on their John Does. He was liberated from a work camp two weeks after the occupation ended but too traumatized to identify himself, he’s currently a newest resident of a Las Cruces psychiatric facility.”

Shiro had a feeling he already knew where she was going with this, but he humored her anyway. “And the other?”

Veronica flipped the laptop around to show the file. The photo on it wasn’t the same one that was on the memorial, this one was one of the faculty photos meant for the Garrison’s teacher web pages and yearbooks.

“Dr. Adam Wolfe, flight instructor and physics professor. Still listed as MIA because he hasn’t been missing long enough to have death declared in absentia.”

“And they wouldn’t need to declare it in absentia if there was a body,” Shiro reasoned. “I’m surprised the military didn’t move to declare it under an imminent peril clause.”

“There was nobody to push for it,” Veronica answered. “His family lives in Brazil, full worldwide communications haven’t been completely restored yet. Locating international family isn’t easy. And the Garrison can’t finalize everything under military jurisdiction because Captain Wolfe’s tour of duty ended exactly two days before Voltron brought down the Galra.”

“So aside from checking to see if there was a grave for him nothing else was done, because he wasn’t the military’s problem anymore,” Pidge paraphrased. “Why does _that_ not surprise me?”

She was bitter, Shiro knew. And she had every right to be, the military had withheld crucial information about her brother and father from her, had tried to withhold the fact that she was alive and in space from the world, and the head of that military had sold everything she loved out to Sendak and nearly gotten her killed. The military had been Shiro’s whole life for a very long time and he had always been loyal to it, but honestly, he was starting to understand Pidge’s bitterness more every day.

“I guess I know what I’m doing once the sun comes up,” Shiro murmured, closing up his laptop.

“Going to check out the plane graveyard under the dogfight location to see if his plane is even accounted for?” Veronica asked. “I’ll change my shoes and grab the keys to a rover.”

“When I finally hit my limit and quit the Garrison, remind me to poach you as a personal assistant,” Shiro answered, rising. “Pidge, will you be okay working on your own for a while?”

“Matt and Hunk should be in soon, we were going to go over the logs for the memory chamber and see if they’d tell us anything,” she answered. “In the meantime, I’ll keep an ear out for Keith or Romelle.”

Shiro nodded and put his laptop into its case, slinging it over his shoulder and heading out of the lab. Veronica followed, and Allura was unsurprisingly on her tail.

“Shiro,” Allura broke the silence hesitantly, almost as if she were afraid he might get mad at her. “I know that your search for this soldier seems important, but I was hoping I could take up some of your time. The sooner the better.”

“What for?”

“I’d like to fix your arm.”

Shiro stopped walking and managed to strangle off a sigh of exasperation. He was getting tired of the issues with his arm, to be honest. The prosthetics were great, the technology light years ahead of anything most disabled humans dreamed of ever seeing, but they always seemed to end up being more trouble than they were worth. He wasn’t a front line soldier anymore, he didn’t necessarily need two functioning arms, and he was beginning to think that maybe he should just let it be.

“I think there are some more pressing things to attend to,” he said gently. “Your skills are probably better spent toward strategizing for the war that’s coming our way, you don’t need to waste any more time working on this.”

“No, but I want to!” Allura insisted, dancing over in front of him when he shifted to continue walking. “You don’t understand. This…it’s important. To you, yes, but to me as well.”

“Do you really want to do this now?” Veronica asked her, frowning. “What if something happens and you’re needed?”

“That’s precisely why it should be now. Everything is beginning, it will start to snowball soon. We all need to be ready, and Shiro has every right to go into this fight whole.”

Shiro looked between Allura and Veronica and began to get a strong suspicion that they had been working on something entirely different from the prosthetic that was laying in her lab. He wasn’t sure why he let anything they did surprise him anymore, Allura was a magical alien princess and Veronica simply refused to live by the laws of human physics.

“Why am I getting the feeling you’re suggesting something that will involve a locked room and no witnesses?” Shiro asked warily.

They looked at each other with something akin to guilt on their faces.

“Oh my God, that was supposed to be a joke but you really do have something weirdly clandestine up your sleeve.”

“Well…how much do you trust me?” Allura asked. She gave him the most innocent smile she could muster, folding her hands behind her back and looking up at him with that big-eyed gaze she used when she wanted to get her way.

“I trust you with my life,” Shiro protested, taking a step back. “But—“

“Then I need you to trust me now when I say I need to do this, for both of us,” she insisted. “I won’t be dishonest with you, I do have ulterior motives. Honerva is building a powerful army in its own right and I believe it’s time I begin to do the same. We need all the strong soldiers in top fighting form that we can gather. Everyone here has had more asked of them in the last few years that most are faced with in their entire lives, but I’m afraid I must ask this of you as well. We need you to be able to fight with us, so please let me do this.”

Allura was right, Shiro had lost a lot in his lifetime. He’d lost his father as a young boy, his mother as a teenager, and his childhood to the haunting shadow of an early death. He had lost his arm, lost is own body, lost the love of his life and lost his emotional stability. His freedom, his free will, and future had all been withheld from him at different points in his life.

But she was also right that a storm was coming. And there were younger people on his team who had been through so much more than he had at such young ages, Allura herself included. Shiro wanted to be of real use, he _wanted_ to fight beside his friends and family and not let everything he’d been through go to waste.

And, if there was even the slightest chance that Adam was alive, that he had survived the invasion to be dragged onto Sendak’s ship, that he’d been sent to a Galra base and put into a ring to fight under the name Cozakul, then Shiro was willing to do anything that might give him an advantage in getting out there to find him.

“All right,” he relented, looking between the girls. “You have me kind of nervous with how secretive you’re acting like this should be, but I trust you. What do you want me to do?”

“Come with me,” Allura pulled the key card for her lab from her pocket and handed it to Veronica. “Can you go grab the case we put together and bring it to the infirmary on the Atlas? We’ll meet you over there.”

Shiro watched Veronica run off down the hallway, then followed Allura in the opposite direction. They left the labs and went up the stairs to the Atlas hangar, heading for the ship. He hadn’t been lying when he’d said he trusted Allura, but he couldn’t help but feel a little bit nervous. He had been marched to and from places with no information too many times to not naturally be paranoid about it, too many bad experiences that would haunt him for a very long time.

The Atlas was quiet except for the echoes of repairs being done throughout the sixth floor as the night shift worked. The crew were all gone for the night, back in their permanent residences except for a small handful. Those included Coran, Shiro, and the Paladins, who had too much going on to go home.

They stepped out of the elevator on the MFE hangar floor, at the opposite end of the ship, and entered the infirmary from the opposite corridor. There was nobody on shift here since the Garrison infirmary was open and functioning, everything was dark and quiet. Shiro turned on the lights while Allura chose one of the empty ICU rooms for privacy, and Veronica arrived a few minutes later.

The case she carried was a silver metal one he had seen Allura use before, when toting her work back and forth between home and her lab, or between her labs in the Garrison and on the Atlas. The sleek, sharp look of it did nothing to calm Shiro’s slowly tensing nerves as he waited to be given some kind of information.

“Okay,” Allura finally seemed to be ready to go. She took the case and Veronica opened a nearby cabinet to take out masks and rubber gloves, which made Shiro officially start to worry. “I’m going to have you sit on the bed here at first, I’ll have you lay down once I remove the base from your shoulder.”

Shiro looked at the bed. Then he looked at his right shoulder, at the large hunk of metal that had been attached there for six months. He looked back at Allura.

“That’s…surgery,” he pointed out. Just in case she somehow didn’t realize.

“Yes. But you won’t feel it!” She added quickly. “I have a painkiller distilled from the leaves of the blottu plant that grows on Arus, it works far better than what you all have been using here.”

She rolled a cart over to the bed for her case as Shiro sat on the edge of it, opening it up in a way that didn’t allow him to see into it. He looked over at Veronica to see if this was some kind of joke they were playing to freak him out, but she was perfectly serious.

“Just trust her,” Veronica encouraged as they both put on the masks and gloves. “What she’s about to do is badass, you’re not going to be disappointed.”

“Well, I guess it’s not the first time I’ve been through anything this weird,” Shiro sighed, giving in. He pulled off his shirt and used the control on the side of the bed to raise the top, pulling himself all the way onto the bed and letting himself recline in a sitting position. “But at least I get pretty doctors this time.”

Allura laughed a little as she filled a syringe with a light blue liquid. She was very careful when she injected it, her touch so light he barely noticed she’d even done it.

“It’s strong,” she warned him. “You won’t feel anything in this whole area while I work, and it’s probably going to make you sleepy. If you fall asleep it’s fine, but it won’t affect anything if you don’t.”

She wasn’t joking. Shiro quickly felt the whole right side of his torso going numb, and the rest of his body started to develop a heavy, sleepy feeling. He waited for some kind of pain as she started to remove first the casing then the internal controls, but her hands were sure and quick. He sometimes forgot she had been the one who’d created this in the first place, and that she was strong enough to take apart things that had taken two doctors to put together previously.

When she got down to the final plate and started working, he instinctively tensed. The base plate was where machine connected to flesh and bone, where wires intertwined with nerves. The basic framework was already there, components that ran from the plate up into his brain in an electronic copy of the nervous system, but this was where they connected to each new addition. This was the point at which pain could begin.

But it didn’t. Shiro kept his head up, resting against the bed, gazing past Allura at the wall instead of looking at what she was doing. He felt her pulling, felt pressure, waited for the usual agony that came with anyone messing around with his prosthetics. But her anesthetic held strong, and for the first time since he could remember, he didn’t suffer while being worked on.

Until he glanced down and saw the red on her gloves. The plate had been removed, cut away by necessity, and she was handling human tissue. Shiro turned his head away, looking up at the ceiling. He could feel his heart starting to speed up and his breathing start to bother him.

The other side of the bed shifted as Veronica sat on the edge of it, drawing his gaze away from what Allura was doing.

“So what’s up with this Adam guy?” She asked. “I know who he is, Lance talked about him a lot, but I didn’t come to the Garrison until after the attacks started and he was already gone. You dated?”

She was trying to distract him. Shiro appreciated it, and he let her.

“He was the raging jerk I always fought with for my first three years here,” Shiro told her with a little smile. “We were forced to be roommates in our last year, we calmed down then. We didn’t really become actual friends until after we graduated, right after my mother died that summer, but we were inseparable for about a year after. Then he had an accident and I was the disaster that broke down and confessed first…we got together once he was out of the hospital and we were together until I left for Kerberos.

“He was…kind of like Keith,” Shiro supposed. “His family was really wealthy, but he didn’t have the best dynamic with his parents so he hid how much he cared about everything by pretending he didn’t care about anything. He came to the Garrison because his mother wanted him to be something prestigious, and being a lowly soldier was the best way to piss her off. I guess he was kind of out of control, but since he got good grades and he rarely did anything that could make the Garrison look bad nobody cared. That’s why he never applied for any exploration missions; he was a top pilot, but he wanted to teach. He wanted to be here for the kids the way nobody was there for him.”

“That’s kind of sad,” Veronica had pulled her mask down since she was on his other side, and was frowning. “I can’t imagine having the kind of family that leaves you feeling like you don’t have anybody.”

“Never say that to his face if you ever meet him,” Shiro grinned hazily. He could feel a sleepiness starting to wash over him, like he’d been warned. “He doesn’t take pity well. And let me tell you, “Cozakul?” That is a very fitting name for that walking typhoon when he doesn’t take something well.”

“He had a temper?”

“No, he has no impulse control. Which I guess is just as bad. I got him to calm down a lot after we started dating, and once I got sick he started dedicating that energy to me instead. It was nice. I didn’t really deserve it, but it was nice.”

“Did you have any plans for after Kerberos? To take it easy with your illness?” Veronica asked. “That was supposed to be your big mission, right? Out to the edge of the solar system. Did you guys plan on like, leaving the military when your tour was up and getting a house and adopting dogs? You seem like the kind of guy who’d adopt dogs.”

“That would have been nice, looking back,” Shiro smiled, but it was more self-depreciating than anything. He felt lightheaded and woozy, almost like he was drunk. “But no. The first thing Adam did when I was diagnosed was ask me to marry him. But I turned him down. I told him there wasn’t any point, it wasn’t like it was going to last forever. I’d be gone soon enough and he’d be moving on, so why bother.”

“Oh.” Shiro saw his mistake written on Veronica’s face, in the way she unconsciously winced at his admission as if even she felt the sting. “Ouch.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I wasn’t very smart a few years ago.”

Adam had accepted his answer with his usual grace, that shrug of one shoulder and impassive expression that said it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. But Shiro knew better now, after going through his own feelings of loss in the last year. Looking back, understanding that once somebody was gone every single second mattered that much more.

“I always thought I was making things easier,” Shiro admitted. “Like if I didn’t marry him then he wouldn’t be a widower. He wouldn’t be burying his husband, he’d just be showing up at a boyfriend’s funeral and then going on his way. He was ready to be there through the worst of it, he was really willing to go through all of that, and I just waved it off. Live fast, die fast, and nobody would have to suffer through anything. Apparently life doesn’t actually work that way.”

He didn’t really mean to put this on Veronica, or on Allura, who he knew was listening as she worked. He hadn’t wanted to put it on anyone, which was why he never talked about it. Nobody ever asked, except Lance recently when he’d come to him for advice, and so Shiro had never had to answer.

He sighed, letting his head fall back against the bed and turning to look in Allura’s direction. He still couldn’t feel anything, which was good, but he also didn’t have any idea what she was doing. When he did look over, his brain seemed to stop working.

Allura’s face was set in a frown of concentration, the first traces of sweat starting to show on her skin from effort. She was barely listening to them, if she was listening at all, her eyes focused on her work with pure determination.

She was working on a bone.

Shiro couldn’t explain it, and for a moment he was sure he just wasn’t seeing properly. It was a mix between being tired and being sedated, he was sure of that. There was no way she was doing what he thought she was doing.

Her left hand gently held and supported what looked like almost a full humerus. Her right hand moved in the pattern of a weaver, pulling back and wiggling her fingers to hook strands of light out of thin air, moving in to wrap them around the end of the bone in a careful pattern. Adding to it, extending it. Building it.

Shiro looked back at Veronica, his eyes wide, completely shocked. He found her smiling at him knowingly.

“I told you it was going to be badass,” she whispered. “Just don’t try to talk to her. She’s trying to work fast, it’s already hard enough.”

The bed shifted again as Veronica got up, pulling her mask back up and crossing the room. She dampened a cloth and brought it over, and Allura smiled thankfully as her friend played assistant and patted away some of the sweat at her temples.

Shiro couldn’t have spoken to Allura even if he wanted to. He was completely speechless, his eyes going back to watching her hands. The rhythm of her movements, the shimmering patterns the light made as she wrapped ribbon after ribbon of quintessence into place, it was hypnotizing. The sedative properties of the anesthetic only added to that, temporarily erasing his concept of time.

He watched as she reached the end, wove the light into the beginnings of an ulna and radius. Wrapped them with delicate threads of ligaments, worked her way down to the wrist. She stopped there and moved back to his shoulder, now beginning to knit strings of muscle, everything laid out in a vivid white with an almost crystalline finish. Shiro couldn’t look away, it was absolutely the most amazing thing he had ever seen even after all he’d come across in this universe.

Veronica stayed by Allura’s side, trying to keep her cool and occasionally getting her some water. This was a lot of complicated work, Shiro could tell, but at the same time he could also tell Allura was up to the task. Eventually his gaze moved from her work to her face, to the spark of intelligence behind her eyes, the faintly shimmering crown that rested on her forehead. The slight upturn at the corner of her mouth that said she was not only proud of tackling this extreme challenge but _enjoying_ the victory of conquering it.

Allura wasn’t the same lost, struggling young princess who had fallen out of a cryopod a few years ago. And Shiro didn’t think he could be more proud of her than he was at this moment.

He tried to keep alert enough to continue to watch her work, but his eyes kept betraying him and drifting closed. Too much worrying, too little sleep, too much guilt condensed into only a few days. At length he gave up and let himself drift off.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years ago**_ :

Adam was freaking weird.

Shiro hadn’t really expected to be given back his old roommate once they’d shown up everyone and beat the current obstacle course record while handcuffed together. They might have only beaten it by a tenth of a second but they’d beaten it, and they’d been set free without having to beg. It was the first week of October now, so of course nobody was going to disrupt things by making another room change, but Shiro was still disappointed.

It was Saturday morning and Shiro had just come back from his usual early morning jog and shower to find Adam standing in front of the large pin board Shiro still didn’t understand. It was lined with neat rows of assignment sheets, index cards, and different colored papers. Adam had them color coded with a Post-It stuck on each, but even after looking at the mess while alone Shiro still didn’t know what the colors meant.

It hung over Adam’s desk, which was freakishly organized. Textbooks were piled evenly on each side and his laptop always sat in the middle, and each textbook pile had a stack of index cards and notebooks with it. The top of the desk had a filing space for each class.

Just to amuse himself, Shiro had switched two of the colored Post-Its on the board yesterday while Adam was out for the evening. Adam had walked in and immediately switched them back without even looking, like he’d physically felt the difference while he was gone.

Shiro hung his towel on the back of his closet door, casting Adam a sideways glance.

“Are you actually studying on a Saturday?” He asked. That wasn’t like the lazy annoyance at all. In fact, Adam seemed to focus very little on his academic work, which made it all the more aggravating how close he always was to overtaking Shiro.

“No. I’m waiting.”

Shiro glanced from Adam to the board and back, but the other cadet offered him no further detail. He just leaned forward and switched two colored Post-Its, then went back to considering the board as a whole.

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound ominous at all. Waiting for…?” Shiro prompted.

Adam checked his watch. For a long moment he didn’t say anything, then he pointed to the window.

“My brother’s birthday was yesterday,” was all he said before looking back at the board.

Confused, Shiro went to the window to look out. There were cars pulling up in the parking lot across from the dorms, black SUVs. Men with dark sunglasses and suits got out, looking around suspiciously, and Shiro saw Iverson coming out to greet the newcomers himself.

“Does your brother work at Area-51?” He asked dryly.

He looked to see if there was any reaction, but there wasn’t. Sometimes Adam would be amiable enough, having decided that he didn’t want to spill blood in the same room where he slept, but others he would blatantly ignore that Shiro existed. There was no in between, and Shiro had yet to figure out what got which reaction.

Shiro shook his head and flopped down on his bed with his own laptop. He put his headphones on and turned on some music, pulling up his assignments to see if there was anything that absolutely needed to be started now. He was looking over a physics study sheet when there was a knock at the door, followed by Iverson identifying himself.

Protocol said cadets were supposed to answer immediately for officers, but before Shiro could get up Adam rolled his eyes and called “come in.”

Two of the men from the parking lot came in, glancing around the room as if looking for threats. They saw Shiro and for a moment he thought they were going to throw him out of the room or something, but instead they simply came to stand between him and the rest of the room to block him from doing anything. Shiro was more than a little confused about what was going on, until a familar woman walked into the room and he almost choked.

“Adam,” she greeted.

“Madam Ambassador,” Adam answered sarcastically. When she gave him a look he pretended to catch himself. “Oh, sorry. Janet.”

“Do you really have to do this every time I see you?” The woman asked, clearly annoyed.

“It’s only once a year, how hard could it possibly be on you?” Adam asked. “Can we make this quick? I’m in the middle of something.”

He nodded toward his board. The woman looked at it, then turned back to him. Shiro could see a resemblance in their faces, in the pretty eyes and the delicate shape of the jaw. But she had dark hair, nearly black, and her skin was darker, and if Shiro was being honest the rest of Adam’s features were prettier than hers.

Even so, he recognized the face of Brazilian Ambassador Janet Lobo. She was known less for her political finesse and more for owning half the financial investment firms in the Americas, one of those faces that was always in the news for being rich enough to buy something stupid or get onto talk shows.

“You always make this harder than it has to be,” Lobo said, holding out a hand to her assistant. The younger woman gave her a blue envelope, which Lobo offered to Adam. “Happy birthday.”

“My birthday’s still in May, Mom. Just like last year, and the year before that,” Adam answered, taking the card. He threw it over his shoulder onto his bed, not even looking at it. “But I’ll consider this as just a really early visit for it.”

“A “thank you” would be nice, just once,” Lobo didn’t seem fazed in the least, as if she didn’t care if Adam accepted the card or not. “And I told you not to call me that. You’re sixteen—”

“I’m seventeen. And if this was actually my birthday, I’d be eighteen.”

“Fine, you’re seventeen, you’re practically an adult,” Lobo corrected herself. “You need to start acting like an adult and stop taking everything so personally. I don’t have time to keep—”

A phone rang. Lobo heaved a sigh and pulled hers out, checking the number.

“I need to take this,” she declared. “Alicia, handle this please.”

She walked out the door, answering the phone. Her security detail followed her, leaving Lobo’s assistant behind and leaving Shiro with the surreal feeling that somebody was playing a practical joke on him. Adam dropped down into his chair, leaning back in it dangerously far and putting his feet up on the desk as Alicia opened the folio she carried and clicked a pen.

“Your allowance is adequate?”

“It’s fine. The credit card expires next month, I need the new one forwarded.”

“I’ll put it in.” Alicia didn’t even blink, taking notes. Shiro had completely forgotten about his physics work, his headphones hanging half off of his ears as he watched this businesslike exchange. “How are your grades?”

“It’s only first semester, there are no grades,” Adam answered, twisting his chair back and forth while still leaning. “I faxed last year’s final report card in July.”

“I’ll pull the faxes. Anything in particular for Christmas?”

“An Audi would be nice.”

“What happened to the Mercedes?”

“It got wrapped around a utility pole at the end of August. Just like I emailed when your insurance guy sent me the form for it.”

“You’re not supposed to send anything to the office,” Alicia answered matter-of-factly. “Personal email or fax only. Pick a car, submit a quote to the trust so it can go on this year’s tax return.”

Adam stopped spinning his chair, his head rolling to the side to give her a look Shiro couldn’t quite decipher. He just knew that even he had never been on the receiving end of that kind of glare, and he was pretty much the person at the Garrison Adam hated the most.

“Oh, I’m fine, Alicia, thanks for asking,” Adam’s voice was almost sickeningly sweet. “I mean, a drunk guy came out of nowhere and hit me going ninety, totaled my car and sent me to the ER, but no permanent damage. Your concern is overwhelming though.”

“If you weren’t fine we wouldn’t be here. December 1st. Will you need a budget for anything extra this year? Christmas and birthday gifts for Claire?”

“No. Let Janet know we broke up yesterday, she loves that kind of news.”

“Will you be staying in the summer apartment after you graduate, or getting something bigger?”

“I don’t know Alicia, it’s October,” Adam threw up his arms, finally starting to get visibly frustrated with her complete lack of emotion. “We could all be dead tomorrow, I can’t plan that far ahead.”

“Knock it off, you’re always so overdramatic about everything,” Alicia sighed. She clicked her pen and snapped her folio closed. “Fine. I’ll send you the paperwork for the trust in April, you can take it over in May and handle those things yourself. Just make sure you submit requests—“

“A month in advance,” Adam interrupted her. “I know how this works. Can you leave now?”

Alicia pursed her lips. She opened a folder she was carrying and handed him two more envelopes, one red and one white.

“Christmas and graduation,” she explained when Adam raised an eyebrow. “You know she’s too busy to come back.”

Alicia slid the folio into a slender briefcase and let herself out, following Ambassador Lobo. The room fell silent except for the soft creaking of Adam’s chair as he started rocking it back again, his head hanging back over the top and both of his arms folded over his face. Shiro had so many questions, he didn’t know where to start.

The silence broke when Adam finally leaned too far back in his chair, pitching over backwards and hitting the floor with a curse.

“What the hell was that!?” Shiro finally shook his confusion, shoving his laptop to the side and launching himself down to lean over the bottom of his bed. Adam looked at him from the floor, rubbing his back where he’d landed. “Your mom is Janet Lobo?”

“Barely,” Adam muttered.

“You know, that actually explains a lot about you,” Shiro knew it wasn’t the most diplomatic of things to say, but it was true. “I knew you had money, but I didn’t know your brat complex came from that high of a tax bracket.”

“Hey, you know what I knew about you?” Adam asked. He followed it up by flipping Shiro both middle fingers. “Mind your damn business.”

Shiro wasn’t put off in the least and he had more questions, but before he could ask Adam got up. He dug through his closet for a change of clothes and then disappeared from the room, leaving Shiro to deal with his stunned confusion on his own. When he came back he was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and picked through his drawer for a set of keys. Shiro glanced at the calendar even though he already knew the answer to the question that popped into his head.

“Going somewhere?” He asked.

“Town. Maybe. Or maybe to commit a felony. My homework is all done and it’s early, I still have time to decide.”

“It’s not a leave weekend,” Shiro pointed out. In their year they didn’t have a weekend curfew to be in the dorms, but until they were eighteen there were only certain weekends they were allowed to leave the base. “You’re going to get caught before you get off the campus.”

“No, you would get caught before you got off campus,” Adam corrected as he left the room. “I don’t get caught.”

Shiro rolled his eyes and scrambled off the bed, grabbing his own jacket and keys and following. He didn’t really have a reason to but he felt compelled, intrigued now by what he’d seen. He knew he was a little too intrigued with Adam in general these last few weeks, ever since they’d fallen asleep after that first night of working on the obstacle course, but he couldn’t help it. The other boy was turning out to have drastically different public and private personas, it was like a train wreck Shiro couldn’t look away from.

Everyone had always known Adam as a top student. Well-behaved, popular, sweet. Shiro had always felt slightly gaslighted when other people didn’t see what he did, when they couldn’t believe that Adam was the one who started the trouble between the two of them at least half the time. Seeing him in private put him into a whole new light, and it was such an amazing disaster Shiro couldn’t even be mad about it.

Adam was a Category 4 hurricane. His default setting when off the Garrison grounds was “Fight Me,” he acted first and thought later, and he ran headlong into every bad idea he was given without regard for consequences. In just a few weeks Shiro had seen him drink tequila shots until he’d passed out, try to fight a goose, and eat a live beetle for five dollars. He had blithely walked off the road to try and pet a wild coyote, zapped himself with a stranger’s taser in the park just to see what would happen, and licked a potted cactus on a dare. He’d accidentally sprayed Listerine in his eyes. He’d gotten startled by a guy in a horror mask outside the pop-up Halloween shop and sprinted into a wall. He’d spent a whole day not realizing his pants were on backwards.

So many of the things he said and did over the years that had pushed Shiro’s buttons were turning out to just be Adam being Adam, quirks of his personality shining through that most people didn’t usually see but for some reason Shiro had noticed. With actual context they were far less infuriating, because the raging dumpster fire was _fascinating_.

He caught up with Adam easily, moving in front of him and spinning around to walk backwards, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets. Shiro had stopped trying to deal with the other boy tactfully once he’d realized that Adam simply didn’t respond to tact.

“I thought Janet Lobo only had two kids,” Shiro pried shamelessly. “I’ve seen them on TV.”

“Nope,” Adam seemed neither thrilled nor bothered with the question. “She has three.”

“How come you don’t have the same last name?” Shiro asked, bracing himself as he backed into the door at the end of the hall and kicking it open without turning around.

“I do.”

“Is Wolfe her maiden name or something?”

“No.” They reached the end of the small lobby and hit the front doors. Shiro was forced to slow down and turn around so he didn’t trip down the three steps outside and Adam was able to pass him, but he still put in no great effort to shake Shiro off. “Wolf is Lobo in English.”

“So your parents decided to name you in English instead of Portuguese?” Shiro asked, starting to get confused. He didn’t know much about Brazilian culture, but that didn’t seem to be it.

Adam came to a sudden stop. Shiro slammed into him, but he was ready for it so he didn’t go down.

“You’re not a complete dumbass, think about it for a minute,” Adam answered. He gave Shiro a heartbeat or two and then started walking again, leaving him to catch up. Shiro wasn’t even insulted. He was too curious, it was impossible not to be after his dorm room had been invaded by what had probably been either US secret service or Brazilian security agents.

So Adam’s mother was a ridiculously rich politician from Brazil. Adam was seventeen but had never been featured in anything Shiro had ever seen about the Lobo family. She couldn’t remember his correct birthday, never came to see him, dealt with him through a trust, and didn’t want him to call her “mom.”

“Oh, damn,” it was so obvious Shiro felt stupid for not figuring it out immediately. “Your dad had you with a mistress?”

Adam actually laughed out loud at that as they reached the front gate. Shiro started to slow down to go back but Adam caught his arm and forced him to keep going, acting as if they had every right to be walking off the property and not even glancing over at the guard shack. The woman there gave them a brief look as they passed but didn’t see anything amiss and said nothing.

“Don’t hesitate, you almost got us caught,” Adam said once they were out on the path. He turned off of it, heading toward the parking lot of a nearby factory. “Seriously, you can go anywhere and do anything if you just act like you belong there. And if you must know, Janet had me after an affair.”

He passed a few cars and stopped at a motorcycle parked in the lot. It was sleek and black, the expensive, imported kind made for speed. He climbed on, pulling gloves out of his pocket.

“I don’t look enough like her or her husband for them to pretend I wasn’t a scandal, so I lived with my grandparents until I was old enough to go to boarding school. She doesn’t even know my real father’s name and she wouldn’t give me her or her husband’s, so she made one up. She keeps me quiet by buying me fancy toys and I have a trust fund waiting for me when I turn eighteen so she never has to deal with me again.”

He tilted his head up to look at Shiro, smiling charmingly as he started up the motorcycle.

“She also pays for my tuition through a shell scholarship fund, so even if you tell anybody any of that nobody’s going to be able to trace anything to believe you. As far as even the Garrison knows, she's just stopping by to see a scholarship recipient.”

“Because I have nothing better to do than gossip about your family life,” Shiro snorted. He was the first to admit that he was nosy as hell, but given his own situation he wasn’t about to run his mouth. “Iverson is going to notice you’re gone, you know. Do you really want to spend the rest of your weekend in detention when you get back?”

“Maybe I’m not coming back.”

“Okay,” Shiro lifted one foot, planting it on the back seat of the motorcycle and effectively blocking Adam from backing out from between the two cars flanking him. He put his hands back into his pockets, smirking slightly. “But if you go off and die somewhere I’m keeping your Versace boots.”

Adam let his hands drop from the grips, his head falling back so he could look up at the sky as if praying for patience. Except Shiro knew what he was really doing was debating on how much he would really hate someone else wearing his favorite boots.

“Look,” he said finally, leaning back a little further to look at Shiro upside down. “Either leave me alone and get out of my way, or get on and finish annoying me on the road. If you’re still standing there in ten seconds I’m just going to run you over.”

Shiro raised his eyebrows, looking from Adam to the motorcycle. He knew he should just go back to the dorms before Iverson came to chew out Adam for his door answering protocol and found them gone, but it was a _really_ nice bike. He pulled his foot down from the seat.

“Do you have helmets or anything?” He asked, already knowing the answer as he climbed on.

“No helmets,” Adam answered, taking his sunglasses out of his pocket and sliding them on. “Die like a man.”

Shiro had been on a motorcycle before, but never as the passenger. As they backed out of the space he realized his predicament, hesitantly resting his hands on Adam’s sides then pulling them back in uncertainty as he tried to figure out what he was supposed to hold onto. Adam heaved a sigh Shiro saw rather than heard and stopped.

“Oh, for the love of God,” he complained, reaching back and grabbing Shiro’s wrists. Adam yanked him forward, flush against his back, and wrapped his arms tightly around his middle. “No homo, okay? That make you feel better? Jesus, the fragile masculinity in this place.”

He took off before Shiro could answer, barely checking for traffic as he whipped out of the parking lot. The Garrison was between two towns, settled at the edge of one by a desert road that led to another. Adam headed for the road, skirting around the edge of the base and merging into the flow of traffic.

That was where the sanity ended. As soon as he was on the highway he started edging up his speed, splitting lanes and weaving in and out of the cars in his way. Shiro was more than a little bit on edge until they were a few miles out, when traffic thinned drastically and they had the road mostly to themselves.

At that point, it was wonderful.

He wasn’t steering it, but he could feel through Adam’s movements that the bike handled like a dream, and the thing could _move_. Shiro’s main regret was that he didn’t have sunglasses of his own to block the wind and had to let Adam’s head block most of it, which didn’t really help him from the bit of sand whipped up here and there. But it was tolerable within the bigger picture of speeding down the open road on a beautiful, sunny fall day.

Of course, that wasn’t the only good part of it. Shiro’s brain was also borderline malfunctioning in the wake of having one train of thought constantly keep returning to it:

_Hot guy fast bike hot guy fast bike hot guy fast bike hot guy hot guy hot guy literally wrapped around a hot guy…_

Shiro did not feel the least bit guilty about the situation. They were on a motorcycle after all, a fast-moving death machine if handled incorrectly, the only safe thing there was for him to do was to be completely pressed up against Adam’s back with his arms wrapped around him tightly. It was a necessity, it kept their centers of balance close and helped Adam maneuver the bike better.

He was allowed to take a short break from being annoyed to decide Adam had a really nice build under that leather jacket, and be smug that the other cadet had no idea he thought so. The opportunity might even be worth the trouble they would get into when they got back.

At least, Shiro thought so until they reached the edge of the next town and hit an intersection with a red light, which Adam immediately blew to make an illegal turn and cut off three cars in the process. One of which was a police car.

Adam was more annoyed than anything as he slowed down, pulling over to the curb. While they waited for the officer to get out of the cruiser and come up to them, Adam glanced back at him.

“Hey, so do you speak Japanese?” He asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Awesome. When he finally gets over here, neither of us speaks English.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

Shiro came out of his dreams slowly, becoming aware of the sounds around him first. There were feminine voices but they were strangely hollow, a bit muffled as if behind glass. He wasn’t really awake but he was no longer asleep either, floating in an in-between as reality slowly filtered back in.

He was upright, he could feel that much. Not really standing under his own power, it was as if some outside force was keeping his body locked and unmoving. Not really scary, just the kind of feeling he’d had once or twice when his brain had woken up faster than his body and had to let it catch up.

Wakefulness came in a gentle wave, as if something keeping him asleep was releasing its hold all at once, and his eyes opened just in time to see the green-tinted cover of one of the Atlas’ healing pods dissipate. He was standing in the open tube, blinking at the bright light in the room and wondering how he’d gotten there. The last thing he remembered was laying down—

Shiro stumbled a bit as he stepped out of the pod, not realizing how strangely off balance he was at first, startling Allura and Veronica. They had been standing in front of the pod and had likely been the ones to turn it off, and now they lunged forward to grab him and keep him from hitting the floor.

“Are you all right?” Allura asked as they lowered him down to his knees. “How do you feel?”

“Like a popsicle,” Shiro admitted with a little smile, glancing up at her. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how cold those things get. Other than that, I feel—”

His mouth stopped working when he moved his gaze from Allura to Veronica. He was kneeling between them, an arm draped around each of their shoulders where they’d caught him and now sat supporting him.

An arm. Around each of them.

For a moment, the women ceased to exist. He sat back on his heels, letting them go and raising his hands up in front of his face in disbelief. Two hands, perfectly matched. They moved the same, felt the same. There was no undercurrent of electricity running in the back of his head, that faint hum of something he didn’t exactly hear but always knew was on to run the machinery that had become a part of him.

His right arm was white, it looked like something carved artfully from stone. A silver line ran down it to the back of his hand where something blue glowed softly, more veins of silver running from that out to his fingers. Small metallic points connected the shining threads at his finger joints, making the whole thing look like some kind of constellation. He touched it, running his left hand across the strange new skin.

It was warm. Soft. Alive. Not metal and wires, at least not on the outside, in spite of its looks it felt real and human. He touched his shoulder and found no metal there, his arm met the rest of his body with no separation other than a shift in the color of his skin.

“…how…?”

That was all Shiro could manage. He was absolutely speechless, not even sure he could believe this was real.

“It’s not perfect,” Allura admitted, reaching out to take his new hand in both of her own. He felt it, he _felt_ her touch as she ran her thumb over the jewel in the back of his hand. He recognized it now, the gem that had originally powered his new prosthetic. “There are parts within that aren’t completely natural, by necessity. I used Honerva’s design for your original prosthetic, Pidge still had all the code and schematics she downloaded from you, but I made it as organic as I could.

“But the main difference is that hers was designed to control you and this is meant to complete you. No programming, nothing to hack. It has some…perks to it that we’ll go over later, but I think I did a decent job.”

Shiro pulled his eyes away from his arm to finally get a good look at Allura. Her hair was a mess, her ponytail frayed and mussed from sweat and the constant use of a damp cloth, and her blouse was pulled out of where it had been tucked in and now had the top half of the buttons open to show the tank top underneath. The work may have simply looked like twisting little strands of light, but he could see in her whole image that it had been a lot of hard work.

He really didn’t know what to say. So instead he grabbed her and pulled her tightly against him in a hug.

“Oh!” She exclaimed, laughing softy and hugging him back. “I guess you think so too. Oh…Shiro…don’t…”

He was trying not to cry, he really was, but he was completely overwhelmed. Once it started there was just no stopping it. It had just been so long, so many years with things either being terrible or just barely staying neutral, he had almost forgotten what it was like to have something to really be happy about.

“Oh no,” he heard Allura say in a small voice. Then she sniffled, and he felt her hold on him tighten. “Now you’ve got me crying too.”

“Oh God,” Veronica sounded like she was giving in too.

Shiro let out a shaky laugh, letting go of Allura with his new arm to try and wipe some of the tears away from his face with his hand. Veronica was sitting back on her heels, her lip trembling as the others crying chipped away at the strong front she was trying to put up. He waved her over, pulling her in just as she started to sob.

They were hot messes, all of them, and once the gates were opened that was it. Shiro was able to calm himself down pretty quickly but with the flood gates open the girls just finally lost it. He hugged them both while they tried to regain their composure.

Maybe everyone on this team was a mess in their own way, but if they kept sticking together then maybe they’d all be okay.


	5. Chapter 5

Keith had expected to be far less comfortable when he stepped off Rolo’s ship than he actually found himself being. Six months of living a human life on Earth had not dulled the familiarity he had developed with alien worlds, especially those occupied by the Galra, and he found himself walking into a culture he immediately understood on an intimate level.

The two years with his mother had been an exercise in full immersion. He had learned traditions, practices, and a fluency in her dialect of the language, and picked up the subtleties of Galra interactions by observing her over time. Things that outsiders wouldn’t completely understand, like the intricacies of how long to hold eye contact and what different hand motions conveyed in certain conversations.

He knew how to navigate these people. _His_ people.

Keith made no attempts to be sneaky as they unloaded a crate of very illegally obtained small arms from the ship. Rolo and Nyma were still smugglers even if they were useful ones, but since what they were helping flood the black market with would likely be used to further destabilize the Galra empire Keith didn’t exactly feel any guilt. He gave them a hand unloading then made plans to meet back up before going his own way, calling Kosmo to his side with a whistle.

The appearances of the Paladins weren’t well known outside of the ranks of Galra leaders, and even then many of them only knew them by sight of their armor. Keith had been known to some before the return to Earth but he had changed drastically in six months and wasn’t afraid of being identified.

He had left his Blade armor behind in favor of traditional clothes, a thick-belted tunic cut to show the sheath built into his trouser leg and the handle of the knife within easy reach there. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he wore some messy streaks of makeup on his face, the dark blue favored by the merchant class that was displayed on so many other Galran faces here. The vivid stripes on his face and arms and the yellow of his eyes gave him everything he needed to fit in without further disguise; he was a halfblood smuggler at a pirate faction base, and from the features of many of the people around him he was in good company.

But he wasn’t here to browse the market stalls for questionable goods—though he had to admit that was tempting—he was here to crash a parts sale. That meant figuring out where the deal would be happening. He had no doubt he had arrived here before Lance, but he still needed to hurry.

The Honor and Flame base was on a rocky planet called Drazka-tel, a black and barren wasteland where life had never naturally settled. It had some liquid water that flowed underground, but the planet in general was a dry, lifeless hellscape. It was tidally locked, its two halves eternally split between unending day and night, with the base located in its twilight zone. A few miles east, in the burning sun, the temperature was enough to kill within an hour. To the west, the moonless night was cold enough freeze without extreme protection.

The planet had no atmosphere, the base was built within a dome. It had been a strategic point in shipping routes before Zarkon had died and a faction had taken it over, and they likely only had the resources to maintain it without expanding. That at least meant he only had a limited area to search, not that it made it any easier. His mission was complicated further by the extra influx of faction members looking to celebrate Quel’Kura planetside instead of on ships.

It was an annual festival celebrating the official forming of the Empire, after the Galra had conquered their first handful of planets. It only lasted a day but it was celebrated on different days in different quadrants, and celebrations differed wildly. For the most part it was just a government holiday, a day off from work to sit around and relax. But in faraway outposts and rocky planets light years from real settlements, it could be an excuse to take things to the extreme.

Draska-tel seemed to be on the moderate side. Keith had seen some places pack stadiums to watch volunteers fight for glory, and week-long festivities that had fireworks and gift-giving. Here it looked like a section of the market had been cleared of its usual stalls to allow for colorful tents and small attractions. As he passed one he could hear drunken noise and music, and he had to steer a very interested Kosmo away from kiosks where holiday street food was being sold.

The permanent structures weren’t immune either. The colors for the holiday were red and yellow, and many of the base’s shops and offices had garlands of foil stars draped in windows and over doors. There were guards on duty as he followed the flow of people into the main base’s lobby, but the atmosphere was relaxed.

If Honerva had made a deal directly with the leaders of the faction, then her errand boy’s ship wouldn’t be using the public landing field he’d arrived at with Rolo and Nyma. It would be docking here, out with official supply ships, and Lance and his associates would be somewhere in this building. Possibly sticking together somewhere quiet, since Alteans wouldn’t exactly be out mingling with Galra and publicly announcing they weren’t really extinct.

Keith did a slow walk around the perimeter of the public area, making mental notes on the number of doorways and how they were guarded. There were three hallways that didn’t lead outside, two labeled as offices and one labeled as the unloading warehouse. There was also an elevator, and the sign told him that went up to the second floor. That was where he decided he wanted to go, to see if there was any high ground with a window where he could view the incoming ships.

The elevator required a passcode, which he of course didn’t have. Keith leaned up against the wall several yards away and watched it, until the doors opened to let three people out and leave the car empty. He probably could have made it inside if he ran for it before the doors closed, but he wasn’t looking to draw attention. Instead he reached down to lightly scruff Kosmo’s fur, giving a soft command.

He felt the cool rush that came with being teleported alongside the wolf, the world blinking into darkness for an instant before he found himself in the elevator as it started to return to the second floor. At that point he figured he was fine, even if there were guards on duty up there they were likely to be lax thanks to the holiday.

“Go on back to Nyma,” he told Kosmo, scratching him behind the ear. “She has treats for you.”

Kosmo’s ear twitched and his tail wagged. He disappeared with a soft pop just before the doors opened, and Keith stepped out into a long hallway.

Conference rooms. Offices. Some kind of auditorium. Galra were going about their business, most of them in uniform with an Honor sigil, but there were enough casually dressed visitors that nobody looked at Keith twice. There also weren’t nearly enough workers for all the space, so the base must have been running practically with a skeleton crew today.

When nobody was looking he peeked into rooms he passed. A lot of them were locked, but a few empty offices had big windows while one or two had balconies. He made his way to the end of the hall and turned, until he found a small alcove where people probably sat to wait for appointments. It had a window that looked out at the official docks, and gave him a perfect view of the area right below where anyone getting out of a ship passed by to come into the building.

He took up watch here, leaning against the wall with one arm and keeping an eye on the comings and goings. There wasn’t much, deliveries probably came on a regular schedule and had likely taken the holiday into account. So when a shuttle that was too small to be for bringing an entire base supplies came in to land, it had Keith’s undivided attention. He watched with interest as its crew of three Galra stepped out, his eyes immediately going to the obvious lack of sigils on their armor. They were intentionally not displaying their loyalty here, which meant they were from another faction.

Or they were Lotor loyalists.

They were followed by a small group of what looked at first to be Galra as well, albeit civilians. They were wearing armor but he could tell from the way they held themselves that they were fighters in an entirely different way from the real Galra around them. They had the height, they had the coloring, many of them even had markings, it was just the way they held themselves that told him they were probably disguised Alteans.

One last person appeared at the door of the shuttle and they all turned their attention to him as if he were the leader, which was funny from Keith’s current viewpoint because this apparent leader was much smaller than the rest of them. He felt his heart skip a beat at the familiar way the new arrival bounced off the final step, came to stand next to the others with a hand on his hip. There was very little question in Keith’s mind of who it was, even before he reached up to push his hood back.

The situation was very serious, but Keith still had to strangle back a laugh. Lance wasn’t a short person and he certainly wasn’t small, but he had a slender build that more closely resembled a dancer than the warrior he actually was. Next to the naturally bigger Galra and the four Altean impostors he looked like a child. He might have a newly acquired ability to change his skin and hair color and give himself intricate Galra markings on his face but his physical size and human features made him appear to be someone’s little brother along for the ride.

If anyone down on the tarmac thought so, they didn’t say so. Three Galra came out to meet the group and Lance motioned to one of the Alteans to handle the interaction. He stayed back, arms crossed, watching the exchange. Obviously smart enough to know that nobody from the Honor faction would take them seriously if they knew he was the one in charge.

The group started to move toward the building, taking the path that would lead them to the door below where Keith stood. He finally pushed away from the wall and moved to stand in the middle of the window, making sure he was in full view as they passed beneath to come inside.

They were going on the assumption that Lance was still Lance. If that was true, there was one sure way Keith knew of to make him do pretty much anything he wanted: make him feel like there was a challenge on the table. He remained still and watched, waiting for them to get closer, his gaze settled firmly on Lance.

They were just about to go inside, to disappear from view completely, when Lance reflexively glanced up at the person looking down at them. Keith saw the immediate recognition in his eyes, the way he began to slow down and look back and forth at the other windows on the second floor to see if he was about to walk into some kind of trap. He didn’t find anyone else, of course, and his eyes came back to Keith. They narrowed slightly and Keith waited to see if Lance would point him out to his cohorts.

He didn’t. Instead he walked faster, brushing the others off with some excuse or other as he disappeared into the building by himself.

Keith had to give Lance credit, the guy was fearless. He had no idea what he was walking into but he was going to do it anyway, only this time Keith was going to make sure that Lance didn’t walk away the victor. He left the alcove and went back the way he’d come, turning the corner just as he saw Lance stepping out of the elevator.

He kept a comfortable pace, quick but not so fast that anybody would think anything was wrong by looking at him, and waited for Lance to look up and down the hallway and catch his eye. When he did Keith kept his gaze and gave him the most infuriating smirk he could manage, turning into one of the empty offices he’d seen earlier and leaving the door slightly ajar behind him.

Once he was inside and out of view he moved faster, crossing the office and going out onto the balcony. The landing docks were around the corner of the building but the balcony had a view of the festival area down below. Fortunately nobody was bothering to look up to notice him as he stepped up onto the balcony wall and jumped up onto the small ledge over the door. Keith slammed his blade into the wall to keep himself steady, flattening himself against it and waiting patiently.

He didn’t have to wait long. He heard the creak of the office door soon enough, and then it was only a matter of less than a minute before Lance noticed the open balcony door. Keith looked down at him in silence as he stepped carefully out, watching him scratch the back of his neck in confusion before moving to the edge of the balcony to look over the side.

That was when Keith knew he had him. He retracted his blade and dropped down behind Lance in silence, sheathing his weapon as he approached and pulling the gun out of Lance’s holster from behind. He pressed it between the other boy’s shoulders.

“I’d ask if there was a gun in your pocket or if you were happy to see me, but I guess I already know the answer.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Lance muttered, letting his head fall back in exasperation as he raised his hands in surrender.

Keith lifted the gun away from Lance’s back, raising it to bring down the butt of it against the back of his head. One quick motion, the other Paladin wouldn’t even really feel it, and then when he was unconscious he could take him right out of here. It was a simple matter of summoning back Kosmo, or binding him here with something and then picking him up from a rooftop on the way out.

It was an automatic movement, the way Keith was used to dealing with this kind of thing. He went into a place, he took everyone down, and he walked out. That was the most effective and efficient way of dealing with most situations, quick and clean. But now he hesitated.

He felt like it was a kind of betrayal to follow through. It would be smart to get Lance out of here quickly and silently, if against his will, but this wasn’t a generic target. He wanted Lance to come with him by choice, to _want_ to leave here with him. He didn’t want to prove Honerva right in the other boy’s eyes, to reinforce the idea that he was violent and dangerous.

“Don’t move.” Keith dropped the gun away, tucking it in the back of his own belt. “I’m not here to hurt you, but I will defend myself if you try to hurt me first.”

He put his hands on Lance’s sides, running them up and around to the front, over his chest then back down to his hips. A quick crouch to let his fingers slide down the outside of Lance’s legs to his ankles then back up on the inside, and when he finished the brief pat down he came away with a knife that he tossed over the side of the balcony onto a nearby rooftop.

“No!” Lance exclaimed, trying to make a grab for it is it disappeared over the side. He had gone very stiff when Keith’s hands started running over his body but now he leaned over the wall, standing on his toes to look down at the blade that was now out of reach. “Come on, man, I borrowed that! Now I’m gonna have to replace it.”

“It’s cheap and bad quality, if whoever you borrowed it from wants more than 10 GAC they’re cheating you,” Keith answered.

Lance didn’t have any other weapons, he knew that. The other Paladin relied on his gun, and probably only had the knife right now because somebody else advised him to carry one. If it came down to a physical fight Keith knew Lance was now stronger, but he was bigger, faster, and better trained.

But he tried not to think of Lance as a target or an opponent. He didn’t want this to be a battle, he wanted it to be like it had been a few weeks ago in the locker room. He wanted that comfortable, safe feeling back, he wanted Lance to talk to him.

_Pretend it’s a date_.

They’d never gotten to go on their date, the closest they’d been was the movie theater when Lance had shyly taken his hand and then neither could look the other in the eye. The awkward touches on the dance floor that had become an intimate hug in the darkness of his room. A stolen kiss before parting ways early in the morning on the base.

Keith reached around Lance from behind, letting both of his hands rest on the top of the wall and pinning the other pilot lightly between himself and it. He kept his fingers loose and his arms relaxed, making it as clear as he could that he wasn’t holding any weapons and wasn’t a threat. He was opening himself up to being hit first if Lance decided to throw an elbow, or worse, but he was willing to risk it.

“I’m here alone. No other Paladins, no soldiers, just my ride waiting for me out on the public landing field. It’s just you and me.”

“That would mean more if I didn’t know you’re at your most dangerous up close,” Lance answered. He was still a little bit stiff, but he slowly rested both of his own hands on top of the wall between Keith’s.

“If you really thought I wanted to hurt you, you would’ve killed me on the Atlas.”

Lance turned his head slightly, more glancing down at one of the arms that were practically wrapped around him than back at Keith. He seemed to be trying to get his mental footing, to figure out what was going on here and how to react. But he wasn’t freaking out and he wasn’t trying to escape, and as long as he stayed calm Keith had a shot at this working out.

“Maybe I just didn’t feel like it,” Lance supposed, looking back over the wall and down at the colored tents. “I was a little bit busy at the time. Or maybe I just liked your stripes, I have a thing for tattoos.”

“Or maybe you just didn’t want to kill your boyfriend,” Keith suggested, recalling Lance’s exchange with Romelle.

“Oh no you don’t,” Lance turned again, this time a little further. He raised a hand as he did so, making an annoyed gesture. “I very clearly heard you say you’re not my boyfriend. You yelled it right out, I have witnesses. Give me five minutes, I’ll have Romelle and Ariella on the comm.”

Maybe it was Keith’s imagination, but Lance seemed to be a bit irked about that. His demeanor was very similar to a snit he’d had back on the Castle of Lions, when he’d overheard Keith asking Coran who had piloted the Blue Lion to Earth and had gotten bent out of shape that someone might want to take it from him.

“You weren’t, at that point,” Keith latched onto that irritation, that thread of the old Lance, giving it a tug. “Yet. I decided you were after you kicked my ass while wearing my armor.”

“Is violence a Galra courtship thing? It figures imperialistic invaders would be into that.”

Keith knew he had to keep the conversation from getting too serious. He had to make sure to keep it steered away from the war or fighting, away from the fact that they were soldiers and away from the fight with the Galra. He knew Lance was missing most of the context his memories gave him, that the was forced to view the world through what narrow, disassociated gaze Honerva allowed him to have. Keith wanted to make him view things a little more personally, to think on his own terms instead of hers.

“No, I just really like it when you wear my things,” he answered suggestively. Lance’s hands were resting on the wall again but he was still partially turned to face him. He got so flustered with the blatant flirting he forgot to keep up his disguise, and the purple tones started to bleed away. “And I think you’re cute when you’re bossy.”

“If you’re trying to be smooth, Kogane, it’s not working,” Lance answered. Keith knew he was lying because the Altean marks weren’t the only thing on his face that were red, there was a familiar blush creeping up along his cheeks.

It was notable that Lance still wasn’t trying to escape. He continued to be a little bit stiff, but it seemed to be more from embarrassment than any kind of fear. Romelle had said he was trying to fight off the hold Honerva had on him, Keith hoped that meant he would consider giving one of his ‘enemies’ the benefit of the doubt.

“Are you sure? I think that was one of my better lines,” Keith said lightly. “And I go by Yorak when I’m not around humans.”

Pidge had suggested not using any names Lance was overly familiar with, and that was about as far from familiar as they got. Nobody even knew about it except him and his mother, there was no way it was going to be blocked. It was also alien, which was another impression Keith wanted to give at the moment. If Lance saw himself as being up against humanity, Keith wanted to separate himself from humans.

“Yorak, huh? So you have a Galra name? It’s cute, I like it.”

“Thanks, I’ll let my mom know you approve.”

Lance let out a sigh through his nose and looked back down over the wall at his lost knife. Then he turned around to lean back against the wall, crossing his arms and leaning back slightly to give himself some space without pulling away completely. Keith’s fingernails clawed lightly against the metal they rested on as he physically fought the instinctual urge to move back and put distance between them for safety.

He made himself stay calm, raising one hand and holding it up clearly within Lance’s view. He used it to slowly pull his blade out of its sheath and set it on the wall, then did the same with the gun tucked into the back of his belt. He left both weapons within Lance’s easy reach, and instead of returning that hand to the wall in a way that would block the other pilot from grabbing either one he rested it lightly on Lance’s hip.

There was now a clear and open path for the gun to be grabbed and put to his head, if Lance chose to do so. Keith had already decided in the stairwell of the Atlas that if this ended with one of them dead it wouldn’t be Lance, and he hadn’t changed his mind.

Lance looked over at the weapons, but he didn’t reach for either of them. He seemed to deflate a little, not sure where to go from here. He’d been told he was supposed to be winning a fight, but with no active fight to win he didn’t have any kind of direction.

“Okay, so if you’re not here to assassinate me in secret, then what do you want?” He asked.

“To see you,” Keith admitted. He didn’t know what to say to be successful here, what the magic words were to make Lance trust him. So he decided to tell the truth for once and not dance around the things he wanted to say but was afraid to. “To see for myself that you’re okay. Can I?”

He let go of Lance hip to put his hand on the other boy’s wrist instead, lifting his arm up. Keith hooked the edge of Lance’s sleeve with one finger but waited for permission before he did anything else. He took the fact that Lance didn’t try to pull away as that permission, tugging the fabric down to reveal his arm.

It had only been a handful of hours since Lance had left the outpost to come here, but in that time his skin had become an absolute nightmare of a canvas. It was almost hard to see the arm itself under all the writing, some of it layered so heavily it was difficult to see what any one word was. Keith saw his own name written over and over, numerous references to the Red Lion, and Lance’s repeated attempts to remind himself of his real name.

The strokes were desperate and dark, and in some spots hidden under smears of dried blood from cuts caused by pen pressure.

Keith inhaled slowly and let him go, taking Lance’s other wrist and checking this arm also. The result was the same, though this writing was messier since Lance was left handed, and there was a small cut there that was fresh enough to still be bleeding slightly. When Keith let go and looked up at Lance’s face again it was to find him looking back at him defiantly, daring him to say something about it. It was written plainly in his expression that he didn’t want or need pity.

Keith pulled the sleeve back down and let him go. He hated what he was about to say, but Lance’s safety was more important to him than anything else at the moment.

“I want you to stop trying to remember.”

The defiance in Lance’s eyes was replaced by surprised confusion, which melted into annoyance.

“I don’t need you telling me what to do,” he shot back. “Last time I checked I was running my own show here.”

“Lance—”

“Lansar, _Yorak_.”

“…Lansar,” Keith conceded. Lance seemed surprised again that he’d folded so easily, but he wasn’t here to have petty arguments. “Listen to me, okay? The bracelets you’re wearing send a signal to Honerva or her druids every time you set them off. She’s probably ignoring it most of the time, but if you keep it up she _will_ start watching more closely. If you don’t stop you’ll be nothing but a crater in the middle of Drazka-tel.”

“What are you talking about?” Lance was adjusting his sleeves back to the way he wanted them, narrowing his eyes slightly. He almost looked like he thought Keith was making some kind of threat…which meant he was unaware of exactly how much danger he was really in.

“They’re bombs, Lansar.” There really was no gentle way to put it, as much as Keith wished there was. “Honerva took you, used you, and is keeping you from remembering that you’re one of her biggest threats. And in case you start to remember, she’s made sure she can kill you from a distance. You, and any number of innocent people you happen to be around at the time. That bracelet you left behind on the Atlas took out two of our reinforced lab rooms when we reconnected its circuits.”

Lance looked down at his wrists, rubbing one of them. He looked disappointed, but Keith didn’t think he really looked all that surprised. Disappointed and a little bit defeated now that he knew his only way of fighting back was no longer safe to continue. Keith had a nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach seeing him like that. He hesitated for a second, the reached up to rest his hands on the wall of the balcony again. This time he folded them, his arms essentially wrapped around Lance’s middle to hold him as close as he dared without risking him taking a swing.

“I want to help,” he said quietly. He needed Lance to really understand that he wasn’t alone. “I’m not here because you took some guns or stole a crystal. I’m not here in retaliation for what happened on the Atlas. I’m here for you.”

“I don’t even know you!” Lance exclaimed, his frustration starting to shine through as his ever-present emotional armor finally cracked. He put both hands on Keith’s chest and gave him a hard shove back, making him let go and stumble a bit. “I have no idea how I met you or who you are, all you are is a fact sheet in my head!”

He stepped forward and shoved Keith again before he could fully regain his balance, picking up steam. When Keith didn’t fight back that only seemed to make Lance more agitated and he shoved him again, this time making him step back through the doorway and into the office.

“Kogane, Red Paladin, pilot of the Black Lion, close combat specialist, lone wolf. That’s it, that’s all you are to me!”

Another shove, and this time Keith ended up with his back against the wall, next to the closed office door. There was no further they could go but that didn’t stop Lance, and Keith had to wince when Lance changed tactics and hit him.

“I don’t need or want your help, I don’t need _anyone’s_ help. Run off somewhere and find something else to be your lone hero mission of the week!”

He wasn’t really being hit, though Lance was more than capable of throwing a punch if he wanted to. Lance was pounding him in the chest with his fist in angry frustration, still unaware of his new strength, and while it didn’t hurt as bad as it could Keith was pretty sure he was going to be a bit sore there later.

But that still wouldn’t hurt as much as the words. It was a painful irony that out of everything they’d been through in the last few years, the one thing that seemed to stick with Lance even through memory loss was that he’d left. Keith had gotten the message that Lance had been hurt by what he’d done when they’d spoken in his room after the bar, but he hadn’t realized the wound was so deep.

_Keith, you ran away. Maybe you should’ve just stayed away._

_Just drift off by yourself, Mr. Lone Wolf._

_I don’t even know you._

_All you are is a fact sheet in my head._

_I don’t need or want your help._

Lance had always known the exact words Keith needed to hear when he needed support, and he’d never hesitated to say them. But he was proving to be just as adept at digging in and doing real damage.

Before the Last Stand, Keith would have spitefully agreed to do exactly as he was told. He would have left, falling into his life-long habit of running away when things got hard. Probably sent another Paladin to try and bring Lance home instead.

He didn’t do that now. It was time to stop running from things just because they weren’t pleasant.

“All right,” Keith said out loud, catching Lance’s wrists. He gave him a hard yank, flipping them around and pushing him back against the wall, holding the other pilot’s arms down low and pinning him in place with his own body. “Then let’s fix that. You don’t need to remember anything about me, I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

It was a stressful situation, but he tried to keep his voice calm and even. He _knew_ Lance, so he knew that he was vulnerable and scared and lashing out. He’d just been told he was wired with explosives he couldn’t remove, he didn’t know he had a home or friends or family, he was feeling alone and didn’t think there was anyone he could trust.

“I started out in the Red Lion. Things happened, I was switched to Black before I was ready. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was constantly doubting myself, but you were always there to support me and encourage me. You called me out when I screwed up and you kept me on track. And when the time came for me to return the favor, I fucked you over.

“You don’t talk about your problems with people. Ever. You don’t want to inconvenience anyone. But you trusted me enough to come and talk to me when you thought you might have to step down for the good of the team. And I did what I thought would help everyone…I left to go on a mission I needed to go on for myself and I stepped down in your place.”

Lance didn’t want to hear it. He tried to work his arms free, but strong or not Keith had more leverage. He was going to say what he should have said months ago, he needed Lance to hear it while he had the chance.

“I didn’t tell you why I was going. I didn’t ask you what you thought about it. I just gave everyone five minutes notice and left one morning, I never bothered to think about what it would look like from your perspective. I knew from our conversation that you were sliding into insecurity and I did absolutely nothing about it, I just left you to fend for yourself.

“I did to you exactly what I was always afraid people would do to me, you let me in and I left. And when I came back and you tried to connect with me again, I brushed you off. I was a different person for a little while, but I never bothered to sit you down and talk about it. I saw some things in the Quantum Abyss that concerned you, but I never told you about them or gave you a chance to decide what to do about them.”

“Sounds like you’re a raging asshole,” Lance answered bitterly. “But I’d guessed that already.”

“You guessed right,” Keith agreed. “So now I’m going to tell you what I didn’t tell you then. I didn’t leave because I needed to go on a Blade mission, I barely knew what the mission was at the time. I left because you were going to give up the Red Lion for me, and I couldn’t let you do that. You wouldn’t make Allura give up Blue for you because she belonged there, she was a great pilot and an amazing fighter and the team was stronger with her there. But you were going to give up Red for me just because you thought it was ‘fair,’ because I’d had her first. You ignored that you piloted her better than I did, that you’d advanced more in your fighting technique than I did, that you threw yourself into being an unofficial second in command even though I’d never even bothered to try. Red meant more to you than anything, and you were going to give her up just because you didn’t think you were worth it.

“When I was in the Quantum Abyss, I saw a vision of fighting you. I saw what I thought was me attacking you, trying to kill you after I’d already hurt everyone else, and you trying to stay alive. When I came back I brushed you off and ignored you because I didn’t want to let you close. I didn’t want you to hesitate to protect yourself from me even if it meant killing me. Allura had just had some trouble with Lotor, I saw you comforting her and I knew you had feelings for her. I tried to just stay out of the way and that kept me more distant. I should have just opened my mouth and talked to you about it, but I was afraid.

“Then we got back to Earth and we fought off the Galra occupation. You were hurt during the fight and you were sick for months, you were never really your old self so I just tried to quietly support you and mostly left you alone. Then, a couple weeks ago, you got better. You tried to reach out to me again, and this time I tried to meet you halfway.”

It all came out in a rush, halting and awkward, and Keith wasn’t even sure if he was making sense. He wanted Lance to understand but he wasn’t good with words, and he didn’t know if he was being clear. Standing on the balcony waiting to see if Lance would decide to grab the gun and shoot him had done nothing to affect his calm, but now Keith found his heart starting to beat faster and his hands starting to tremble. _This_ was the part that actually made him feel real fear.

“I’m not here because it seemed like a good solo mission, I’m here because I love you.” The words came out smoothly enough but as soon as Keith said them he felt lightheaded. It was fortunate that Lance had stopped fighting him, because he didn’t think he had the strength in his hands to keep holding him still. “There’s no need for you to remember me ever saying that to you before because I never have, this is the first time. I’m _in love_ with you. I left you before when you needed me and I regret it, I’m not going to do it again. So even if you walk away from me right now, I’ll keep following you. I’ll keep tracking you down and I’ll keep showing up, because I love you.”

It was freeing to say it, in a way. He had whispered the words before in the quiet of a hospital room but now it was blatantly out in the open. Whatever happened from here on out, he’d finally said what he felt.

Lance was still pinned against the wall, but he was no longer struggling. He wasn’t looking at Keith either, he was looking away to the side as if maybe he could pretend hard enough that he wasn’t in this mess for it to be true. After a moment his head dropped down, like he was trying to hide his face from view.

“I need help,” Lance whispered. It was so soft Keith would never have heard it if they were still out on the balcony and not in the quieter office. “I can’t do this. I can’t get out of this. I’m not allowed to remember, I’m barely allowed to think. I’m disposable, she’s going to kill me, it’s just a question of when. I don’t know who’s on her side, I don’t know who’s on mine. I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m on your side,” Keith answered. He let go of Lance’s wrists and took half a step back to let him move from against the wall. When he did, Keith reached down and took both of Lance’s hands in his. “The rest of the team is on your side. Romelle is on your side. And no matter what that woman told you or wants you to believe, Allura is on your side.”

“Well if that’s true then I screwed up pretty bad. I helped them bring back Lotor, I helped them get Sincline, I helped disable the Atlas.”

“Yeah, you did,” Keith agreed. He squeezed Lance’s hands and gave him a little smile when the other pilot looked up at him. “But I’m going to tell you the exact same thing you told me when I played right into the enemy’s hands: now we’ve got to fix it. Come with me, Lance. We can find something to jam the bracelet signal and I can take you home.”

“I…can’t,” Lance’s answer was reluctant, almost tired. “I’m sorry. I want to, but I can’t. The Honor faction is in holding near the outpost, Honerva will be taking the Alteans and making their final exit by late tomorrow night. At that point they’ll move in and that outpost will be a war zone. I can’t leave Romelle there, I already know Honerva doesn’t plan to take her, and if there’s even the slightest chance I can talk any of those Alteans into not going to Altea Beta then I have to try.”

“That’s a big risk,” Keith frowned, choosing his words carefully so he didn’t give away that Romelle had been in contact with the Paladins. “Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that Romelle can’t just be left behind. But she’s smart enough to lay low until the worst is over and then contact us. Having you go back there is a bad idea.”

“They’re kids, Yorak,” Lance insisted. “Some of them only thirteen and fourteen. They don’t know what they’re doing anymore than I do…she’s just going to turn them into child soldiers. _Nobody_ is looking out for them, there’s nobody to care if they get hurt or killed.”

“If I let you go back there, I can’t go with you,” Keith pointed out. “There will be a no fly order in affect for any ships without high level clearance, and if I fly my Lion in there I’ll spark a real war.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t really inviting you along for that part,” Lance answered. For a moment, with the way his one eyebrow raised, it was like having the old Lance back. “I don’t think Altean children would react well to a Galra rolling up. That’s the kind of thing you have to introduce them to slowly.”

Keith did not want to let Lance go back there. It had been weeks of worry just to get to this point, to a moment where he had a chance to bring him home. Having him walk back out that door was the last thing Keith felt like he could handle. But at the same time he understood, Lance had spent time with these people and had gotten to know them to an extent, he couldn’t just abandon them.

And he agreed with Lance’s assessment. If any children could be saved from whatever fate Honerva had planned for them, then it should be done.

“All right,” he agreed, even though they both knew he couldn’t stop Lance anyway. “If she’s not going to be back until tomorrow night, you have some time to get there and get out. Just promise me that when you’re done with this you’ll come back to me.”

“Yeah, sure,” Lance answered, pulling the hood of his cloak back up. Keith heard the unspoken ‘maybe’ and knew Lance wasn’t one hundred percent on board with trusting him just yet.

He reached up and caught the edges of the hood while Lance was unprepared, using it to pull him forward. Before he could resist, Keith kissed him.

Just like in the locker room, his heart was pounding and he expected the worst as far as reactions. But also just like in the locker room, he felt Lance relax after a moment of stiffness. When Keith broke the kiss he only pulled back an inch or so, keeping his hold on the hood.

“Promise,” he insisted softly.

Lance was visibly thrown off. His eyes were a little unfocused and his blush was vivid. He blinked several times to bring his sight into focus, trying to process what had just happened.

“Okay,” he mumbled, still off kilter from how close Keith was. “I promise. God, that is so weird to do with somebody I barely know.”

It wasn’t really the time for joking or teasing, but Keith couldn’t stop himself.

“Do you want to do it a few more times?” He offered. “I’d be willing to, as a favor to you. Just to help get you used to it, make it less weird.”

“…I’m leaving,” Lance recovered, his shocked expression replaced by an annoyed one. He pulled the hood free of Keith’s grip and shifted his colors, the purple of his Galra disguise waxing back into his features.

“I mean, it’s a sacrifice, but I’m willing to make it. I’ve got ten minutes to spare.”

“Walking out the door now.”

Lance disappeared out of the office. Keith crossed is arms and waited, smirking slightly, and a second later Lance returned. He crossed the office and went back out to the balcony, returning with the Marmora blade and his gun.

“Shut up, Yorak,” he muttered as he left the office again without looking at Keith, throwing the knife in his general direction on his way.

Keith listened to Lance’s footsteps fading down the hallway, sighing and letting his smirk fade. He wondered if this was what Lance had felt like every time he’d gone on a Blade mission, having the knowledge that he was on his way to do something dangerous but being able to do nothing but let him leave and hope he made it back. They were soldiers, Lance had proven over the last week just how capable he was, Keith knew he had to respect the other pilot’s choices and trust his ability.

That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it, though.

He waited until enough time had passed for Lance to have rejoined his group then left the office, heading for the elevator. He needed to grab Rolo and Nyma and get back to Black, then call Allura for a wormhole back to Earth.

The second Lance made contact, the whole team was going to bring him home.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this entire f***ing chapter in Comic Sans just because I know for a fact it’s the font Adam intentionally used on his doctoral thesis.

The shuttle’s console was completely different from anything he’d ever been trained to use, but the controls seemed fairly intuitive. There were a lot of cool holographic overlays instead of flat screens and aliens seemed to prefer levers over sticks, but the same sorts of controls seemed to be located in the same areas of the console as on a human vessel.

Adam finished firing up the engines and prepping the shuttle to go, hopping out and back into the lab to find Romelle and James still hanging out over by those weird tubes.

“Sometime today?” He prompted, heading for Honerva’s laboratory area. Some things had been packed but nothing had been loaded onto a ship yet. “I don’t know if anybody else noticed, but we’re on a tight schedule here.”

“I can’t get it to open!” James complained, continuing to punch a seemingly random sequence of buttons. “And Romelle’s no help!”

“It’s ten thousand years old, how am I supposed to know how it works?” Romelle demanded. “How old do you think I _am_?”

“You should at least be able to read more of this than me, isn’t the language similar at all?”

“Ugh, move out of the way and let me see. Here, this one says ‘off.’ No, wait, that might be ‘low’…”

Adam sighed and rubbed his temple. If he survived this he was going to buy everyone key chains that said “Embrace Chaos,” because none of them knew how to think outside of the box. He walked away from the table and went to a shelving unit that held ship parts, picking up a length of heavy metal pipe and hefting it. It would do.

“Move,” he commanded, strolling across the lab.

They both just stood there looking at him like they didn’t know what the word meant. Until he raised the pipe and they realized he wasn’t going to stop just because their skulls were in his way, at which point they both screamed and ducked as he slammed the pipe into the glass of the tube. It cracked nicely, spiderwebbing out across the surface.

“What are you doing!?” James screeched from where he’d stumbled back and fallen onto the floor. “You’re going to wreck it!”

“Who cares? It’s not yours,” Adam answered swinging again. Rules about how to correctly treat other peoples’ property had gone out the window at this point.

This time the glass shattered. The cover of the tube falling away must have made some kind of automatic ‘off’ switch kick in, because the glass dissipated into a shower of flecks of light as it fell instead of into a mess of pieces on the floor. The body inside slumped forward.

Adam moved back instead of catching him, and all three of them watched the former emperor fall like a chopped down tree and hit the floor face-down.

“Tie him up,” Adam ordered, stepping over the body and tossing the pipe across the room. It hit something fragile and made satisfying crashing sounds.

“What?” Romelle asked dumbly.

“Tie him up,” Adam repeated as he headed back for the lab table. He couldn’t identify any of it but he had seen Honerva treat it all very lovingly while they had been trapped in the airlock, so he just started grabbing things at random and putting them into a metal case that was there. “Come on guys, do I have to give you directions for everything? Be proactive. Tying up is standard for a kidnapping.”

Romelle and James looked at each other, then started to look around for something to bind their newly acquired captive with.

“Just out of curiosity, is there something you want to tell us?” James asked, fishing a rope down off a high shelf.

“Not until the Nevada statute of limitations is up,” Adam answered, closing the case haphazardly and ignoring the ‘crunch’ of delicate artifacts breaking. “Wrists behind his back, bind his ankles, and make sure he’s gagged. Trust me on all three of those points.”

While Romelle and James tried to handle that, Adam continued to work his way through Honerva’s lab. He tore things out of boxes and pulled things off shelves, taking anything that looked new and useful and intentionally breaking anything that looked ancient and irreplaceable. All the while he searched, opening containers and feeling around in the backs of drawers.

Adam was not unfamiliar with Haggar, unfortunately. He had been dealing with her for the last six months, since his arena match at Central Command, and none of it had been pleasant. He had not known that the witch was Altean, or that she and the empress of the pointy-eared weirdos were one and the same. Now that he did, however, he was hoping to find something she had taken from him during his time here. Something very important to him, that he was loathe to leave behind.

He didn’t find it. Disappointed, Adam carried the case he’d filled across the lab and stopped about three yards from the airlock, tossing it into the shuttle from there like a bowling ball and ignoring the further sounds of things cracking.

He hated this place and everyone in it, and he didn’t care if everything was in tiny pieces by the time he left.

The others had gotten their hostage tied up by the time he finished. Adam returned to where they were trying to figure out how to pick him up and waved them away. He grabbed the rope tied around Lotor’s ankles and dragged him across the floor by it, ignoring the sounds of his unconscious body hitting things along the way.

Once inside the shuttle, Adam left Lotor on the floor by the seats and checked to make sure that he was still alone. When he was certain there was nobody to see, he fished out the small case he’d pulled from one of Honerva’s shelves and slipped into his flight suit pocket while he was raiding her things. He opened it up to check it, taking stock of its contents.

Three syringes of a russet-colored liquid. He pulled one out and inspected it, pleased to find it was definitely the same as the shots he was regularly given down in the arena cells. This was just about a week’s worth, which didn’t give him a very long time, but was still a week more than he’d expected to have. He still didn’t know what it was, or where Honerva had been getting it, or whether it could be easily made.

He just knew his last shot had been an hour before he’d gone to see Lance and James in their holding cells and that he was feeling the strain. Adam rolled up a sleeve and slid the needle into a vein, emptying it and then sliding the syringe back into its place in the case. He tucked the little metal container up on a high storage shelf and went back out into the lab.

He found James and Romelle still standing over by the tubes, but now they had their hands up. There was a blaster being aimed at them, held by the Galra woman who had gone into the quintessence field with Lance.

Good. She had made herself scarce since Lance had fetched Lotor, impossible for Adam to track down given his limited ability to travel, but he had been hoping she would appear at some point.

“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Adam called as he crossed the lab, refusing to acknowledge the weapon in in her hands.

He didn’t slow down when she swept it over to aim it at him, or let her know he was concerned in any way. She might have had a weapon but he intended to control this little meeting and make sure it went the way he wanted it to. Adam stopped in front of her, resting his hands on his hips and blatantly taking stock of her from head to foot and back.

She was a tall one, only a little shorter than him, and didn’t look impressed with him in the slightest. Dressed practically, armor that was scuffed and marked with use and her hair pinned back in a way that said she cared more about being able to see to shoot than her looks. There was something different about her style, he noticed, but he didn’t say anything about it.

“Acxa, right? James has told me a lot about you, none of it good. Unless you’re interested in the fact that he thinks you’re hot.”

“Dude!” James exclaimed.

“You’re not smooth or subtle, she already knew,” Adam answered easily, still focused on Acxa. “I’m guessing you’re the one who conveniently parked the shuttle up here. So are you ready to leave, or did you want to break a few things on our way out too? It’s really therapeutic.”

Acxa looked him up and down in return. Her eyes stopped at his thighs for a moment, at the two halves of his staff strapped at his sides, then she took a big step back out of his reach and lowered the gun.

“What makes you think I’d take you with me when I leave?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

Adam had spent most of his life manipulating people in one way or another. He used his looks, he used his body, nothing was off the table, but he found the most success in simply talking. Eye contact and confidence added weight to his words on top of his gift for figuring people out. They tended to say one thing but think another, and there was always something about them that gave the unspoken thought away.

Like Acxa’s finger slipping off the trigger to lightly tap the side of the gun she held down at her side. She didn’t feel threatened enough by any of them to be prepared to fire in defense at an instant’s notice, and she had no intention of firing on them first.

“Uh, better question,” James piped up, glaring at Acxa and crossing his arms. “What makes anybody think we’d let her leave without us? Or that we’d take her with us at all? She shot me!”

“James, I’m going to give you a really hard to swallow truth here,” Adam answered, glancing over at him briefly before turning his gaze back to Acxa. “You and I are the kind of men _every_ woman wants to shoot. Romelle’s probably daydreamed about it seven times since we got here.”

“Eight,” Romelle said helpfully.

“Besides, Acxa’s the one who paid off Ryla to send me into the arena and save your ass,” Adam added. “Now she’s got Lester and she’s done sucking up to Honerva, so she’s going to get everyone back into Good Guy territory before she goes on her merry way.”

Acxa looked up at him sharply, but his only response was to give her his most charming smile. He had never even had a conversation with her before, she barely knew who he was, and now he had her a bit shaken. Which was exactly how Adam liked to keep the people around him.

He had known as soon as she’d gone into the quintessence field with Lance that she wanted to make sure he came back in one piece. Not just alive, Honerva knew he would come back alive and she had been indifferent to whether he went in alone or not. Acxa had not only gone in to make sure Lance didn’t do something to maim himself, but she’d taken extra pains to ignore her own quintessence sickness when they’d returned so she could administer first aid.

Adam had also been in the arena constantly since he’d been here, pretty much every day and sometimes twice a day. He was _never_ put in to help new arrivals, only pitted against them once they’d been around a few months and had become a challenge.

It only made sense that the reason Acxa would bring people to Honerva even though she didn’t want them hurt too badly was because she believed they were needed. So far, there was only one thing—or rather, one person—that had been acquired since Lance and James had arrived.

Everyone was really interested in this comatose emperor. That made Adam interested.

“She can’t have Lotor,” James said flatly. “And she can’t go with us. We outnumber her and _she shot me_.”

“Okay, first of all, you can’t stop me from taking Lotor,” Acxa didn’t know how to handle Adam, but she covered it by turning on James. “I can take him from you if I want to. Second, you have bigger problems. The Alteans downstairs have put in a call to Lance’s and Honerva’s ships telling them that the Honor faction is moving in and prepping to wormhole them back. Your Earth ship’s power crystal is also still here and can’t be moved, that’s probably not the kind of thing you want to just walk away from.”

Adam looked over at James, waiting to see if he’d complain further. Ultimately, he intended to override any opinion the other two gave, but he figured he’d give them a chance to at least spit them out. Just in case they lined up with what he wanted.

“She left the Infinity Zero core here?” James seemed surprised enough at that to forget about his leg for a moment. “I would’ve thought she’d be carrying that thing everywhere she went.”

“She can’t,” Acxa answered. “It needed five alchemists at once just to deactivate it so it could be removed from the Atlas, but once it was brought here and the barrier they had around it was taken down, it…evolved to be immune to that magic. It reacts whenever anybody gets close to it, the only way she can even transport it is in a huge sealed box they were building out of metal over in the hangar.”

“We have to try to get it,” Romelle insisted. “And if Lance is returning, we can’t leave without him.”

“Try to remember that they’re calling Honerva back too,” Acxa warned. “It might take her longer to get here than Lance, she has a bigger ship to prepare for travel. So Griffin can stand here and argue whether I’m coming or not until he’s blue in the face, but we need to get moving.”

She turned and left the lab, heading for the elevator. James looked between her and the others for a moment then threw up his hands in frustration, trailing after her.

“Ugh, fine, but we’re only putting up with you until we get our crystal and we’re ready to leave, then we’re ditching you like a bad habit!”

Adam watched them both go, then looked at Romelle. “Ten dollars says he thinks she’s hot _because_ she shot him.”

“I don’t feel like losing ten dollars,” Romelle declined as they followed. “Do you think Lance will make it back before we leave? If he does, he might be able to help us get some of the Alteans off the outpost before Honerva gets here. They consider him the hero who saved Lotor, the younger ones will listen to him.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,” Adam answered as they slipped into the elevator with the others.

He tuned them out once they were inside, standing at the elevator doors with his back to them in a way he knew would irritate Acxa. To be honest, he wasn’t happy to hear that Honerva would be returning soon. He had seen what she could do when he’d only known her as Haggar, coming face to face with her again was the absolute last thing he wanted to do. The Galra were familiar, he could handle them. The Alteans were young, Lance was Lance, he could handle those too.

Adam didn’t think he could handle Honerva.

The elevator reached the next floor down and opened, but rather than step right out Adam peeked out and looked up and down the hall. The others did the same, taking stock of the situation and noticing the three young Alteans huddled in a group a few doors down.

“We need to be careful,” Acxa warned. “Honerva’s war room is at the end of the hall, past those kids. They all know at least a little alchem—wait!”

Adam ignored her and stepped out, strolling down the hall toward the group. They were probably about fifteen or sixteen, the same age as many of his students, and he didn’t have time for playing around with children. One of them made the mistake of fumbling to extend the fighting staff she had hanging at her side, but Adam simply pulled it out of her hands as he passed and snapped it in half across his knee. He tossed the pieces over his shoulder as he kept walking, vaguely aware of the sounds of the young Alteans scampering away when they spotted the others, and snapped his fingers impatiently at the war room’s lock pad as his group caught up with him.

Acxa was clearly pissed off that he was calling her like a dog, but that was the point. She put a hand on the lock pad and it beeped, the door sliding open.

That told him yet another one of her secrets.

He had no idea what this Infinite Zero core looked like, so he stepped to the side when he was inside and let the others go ahead of him. Adam walked slowly around the interior of the room instead, poking and prodding at the things laying about. The walls were bare but there were containers with rolled up maps and charts, and cases holding the artifacts that used to be on now-empty tables.

Adam began going through drawers and opening cabinets, digging through any storage he could find. There wasn’t really much, most of the room was fairly bare as far as furniture went, and he didn’t find a lot of interest to him. He could hear the others talking, and an occasional yelp of pain, but he continued ransacking the office until he reached Honerva’s desk.

He started pulling out drawers, turning them upside down and raining their contents on the floor before tossing them aside. It was mostly just office supplies, pens and files and papers that held sketches of her research. Adam wasn’t interested in any of it, until he heard the sound of metal bouncing across the floor.

He dropped to his knees behind the desk, shoving papers aside to try and see. After a moment his fingers closed around something cool and hard, and he sat back on his heels to hold his find up in the light in relief.

Two dog tags. His own, of course…WOLFE, ADAM. 587-97-3197, RHNULL, JEDI. But it was the other one he had been worried about losing.

SHIROGANE, TAKASHI. 591-67-2768, A POS, SHINTO. Left behind by Takashi when he’d gone to Kerberos, and given to Adam by Iverson when it became known that the mission crew had supposedly died.

Adam cupped the tags in his hands, hugging them against his chest for a moment to reassure himself that he had indeed found them and they were real. Aside from the photograph Sendak had taken from him, the tag was the only thing he really had left of Takashi. Adam was going to give everything he had to try and get Lance and James back home, but he didn’t honestly believe he would ever see Earth again himself. Earth, or anybody now on it.

He slipped the chain around his neck but paused in the motion of tucking the tags under his flight suit when he heard something familiar. Or rather, felt something familiar. Like the song in the mountains, a gentle call that made him sit up straighter and look over the top of the desk.

The others were over by the window at the far side of the room, near a small blue crystal floating in a glass case. James was holding a hand against his chest and swearing, and Romelle had a finger in her mouth as if she’d been burned. Acxa looked at them both with some trepidation, then tensed and winced as she slowly reached out to touch the case herself. She gave a yelp as something zapped her.

“It’s no good,” Romelle said. “We can’t even get the stupid glass open, let alone get the core. It must have some kind of mind of its own, like the Lions. That’s probably how it shifted the Atlas.”

Adam looked past them, to the glowing stone. It flickered softly with a regular pulse, like something alive and breathing. The song felt like the great blue lion he’d stumbled across in the caves, like it was calling for someone. Not for any of them, it was calling for someone who wasn’t here to answer.

None of the others seemed to notice. Adam got the impression that it was summoning him over, that it was willing to deal with him for now. It wanted him to be the one to transport it for some reason, which to be honest made it just as poor a judge of character as the blue lion had been. But they needed this thing for the Atlas and it wouldn’t let any of the others touch it, so he supposed he was stuck.

Adam finished tucking the dog tags away and rose, purposefully crossing the room. He reached over and opened the case, taking the stone and tucking it away in the breast pocket of his flight suit.

“What…how?” James asked angrily, holding up his singed hand as Adam turned and started to walk back to the door. “What the hell even are you? Do you just flip off reality and it leaves you alone?”

“It asked me to take it,” Adam shrugged, opening the door and motioning for them to start moving.

“It asked you?” James echoed, pausing halfway to the doorway. “It _asked_ you? It’s a glowing rock, how the hell does a rock talk?”

“James, we have a hyperactive elf and a purple chick with us,” Adam answered, sweeping an arm to indicate Romelle and Acxa. “Your leg is made of magic metal and Legolas is upstairs in our trunk. Is a talking rock really the hill you want to die on when it comes to the weird shit that goes on in space?”

James sighed and stepped out of the office. Romelle followed, but Adam stopped Acxa from proceeding by putting his arm across the doorway and blocking her.

“James, Romelle, go up to the shuttle,” he ordered. “Secure whats-his-face and have it ready to go. Acxa and I are going to wait for Lance.”

“What if something happens?” James frowned, hesitating to obey. “How are we going to get to you if things go south?”

“You’re not,” Adam answered. “If that fighting reaches this outpost, you go whether we’re back or not. Same if those Altean kids decide to suddenly get their shit together and call up some Galra guards. In fact, if anything happens that’s even remotely dangerous, just go.”

“I don’t really like that idea,” Romelle declared, stumbling a little as James caught her arm and pulled her along anyway.

“Good thing it’s not a vote, then,” Adam replied.

He watched them until Romelle opened the elevator for them and they were out of sight, then turned his attention to Acxa. He dropped his arm from blocking her but leaned against the doorway instead, still effectively keeping her from going any further. He relaxed and smiled, crossing his arms in a way that would make it difficult for him to draw his staff quickly, intended to make him seem more harmless.

“So. Why does a woman who obviously doesn’t need any of us idiots put so much effort into retrieving a guy she probably also doesn’t need from the quintessence field?” He asked. “You managed to kidnap two high level soldiers from Earth, which sounds like it’s pretty heavily fortified at this point, so I’m getting the impression you’re just as much of a fighter as you look. You don’t need Pretty Boy up there to get by, so what gives?”

“That “pretty boy” happens to be an alchemical and technological whiz kid,” Acxa answered, crossing her arms as well. “He’s also over ten thousand years old, he’s a living repository of first hand knowledge.”

“Doesn’t hurt that he’s apparently an emperor I guess,” Adam supposed. “James tells me he’s Honerva’s son, so that would make him at least part Altean, too.”

She had a stray lock of hair that wasn’t quite held back in the clip she wore. Adam slouched a little against the doorway and reached up to lightly curl it back behind her ear with one finger, careful not to actually touch her. She looked at him defiantly, knowing he was daring her to get uncomfortable and pull away, and refused to move. But she couldn’t hide the very faint blush that colored her cheeks.

“Which makes me wonder. Are you so loyal to this guy because he’s actually useful, or just because you’re Altean and he’s your leader?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. Adam sensed her starting to close off, but he wasn’t ready to relinquish control of the conversation yet. He eased his posture a little more. Softening his voice and schooling his expression into a careful mask of concern.

“Look, I’ve got three kids here I need to help get home. Lance and James are soldiers, but they’re out of their depth. Romelle shouldn’t even be here. And what are you? Twenty? Twenty-two? And sneaking around against Honerva. I have a feeling you’re just desperately doing something you feel needs to be done, but you’re only one person and you’re bleeding in a shark tank. I’m willing to try and help you here, but I need to know what I’m dealing with before I hand your boy toy over to you.”

She looked conflicted for a moment, but he wouldn’t break eye contact to let her collect herself. That was an important part of getting people to tell him things, the eye contact. The more unsteady and uncomfortable he could keep them, the more they talked.

Acxa was no exception. She tried to not be manipulated but he was telling her what she wanted to hear, that he understood and was willing to help if she’d give in a little. She gave a huff and let her appearance change, the blue tint of her skin lightening considerably to a tone closer to Romelle’s and the crests running along the top of her head fading away. The marks under her eyes became visible, the same blue-ish purple color she had been keeping her skin, now revealed as everything else lightened.

“How did you know?” She asked irritably.

“You had four crests last time I saw you,” Adam admitted. “Now you have two. You might want to fix that before anyone who sees you often notices. You also opened a door and worked an elevator that are keyed only for Alteans under this lockdown. Why is Lotor important?”

“Lotor’s vision for the Galra empire is the only hope we have of stopping the spread of hostile takeovers,” Acxa frowned. “People want peace, they _will_ follow him, but Galra mob mentality stops them from taking those steps themselves. The only hope Alteans have of not being hunted down and murdered again is if Lotor takes over and finishes enacting the policies he started before he was left in the quintessence field.”

“I dunno, sounds like he should’ve been left there,” Adam answered. “No offense. I’ll openly admit I’m biased when it comes to Lance, and this guy basically tried to murder him and his friends from what I’m hearing.”

“Lance and his _friends_ were misinformed,” Acxa scowled. “And I say that as someone who was born and raised on the colony, and who personally worked with the Alteans Lance is under the impression we killed.”

Adam didn’t press on that point, he knew she wouldn’t go into details while time was of the essence as it was now. He could get that information later, for now he needed a bigger picture of what he was walking into.

“This colony you’re talking about, it’s where these kids come from?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the adults?”

“Moved to the secondary colony once they came of age,” Acxa answered. “Look, space is dangerous. Starting a whole new planet out in the farthest reaches of the known universe, away from Galra eyes, means colonizing a planet away from trade routes and mixed civilization. Planets that can support life are few and far between, and most of them are hostile. The second colony is still being colonized and domesticated, it’s all done by adults. There are a few who stayed behind to care for the children, but for the most part the safety of the first colony was where we kept the young.”

“It was a nursery,” Adam translated, feeling his distaste beginning to solidify further. “And Honerva raided the nest once the defenders weren’t around.”

“It’s highly likely she killed any of the caretakers we left behind,” Acxa agreed. “We would test them when they turned eighteen, to see if they were suited for the more alchemical jobs, before we assigned them duties on the second colony. She tests them and brings them aboard earlier, as young as eight and nine. She keeps most of them at this “Altea Beta” for training and only brings the oldest or most gifted ones with her as her little court when she works off planet.”

Adam hated this. He hated everything about it. He didn’t want to ask the next question because he knew the answer was going to piss him off, but he needed to know anyway.

“How many children are left on the colony?”

“I don’t know.” It was the first time Acxa’s expression changed to something akin to hurt, but she wiped it away quickly. “Since she found it, she’s used her Haggar persona to put a secret base there. Galra loyalists keep it on lockdown, I haven’t been able to get in. Supply routes to the second colony have been disrupted, the few of us still out here lost contact with it two decaphoebs ago. Empire factions have been warring over a huge expanse of space between it and civilization, we haven’t been able to get there to gather backup and try to go into the first colony. Estimating though, probably around three hundred children between three and seven.”

Adam didn’t have to ask the obvious follow-up question, so he didn’t. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Honerva had two courses of action for the children that didn’t test with enough alchemical ability to be useful to her: raise them, probably under terrible conditions, to produce more potentially gifted children as if they were livestock, or kill them.

“You need Lotor to step up and shut down her base on the colony,” he summed up Acxa’s dilemma. “And to clear the fighting so you have access to the second colony, so alchemically gifted adults can go to this Oriande place Romelle mentioned and get your kids back. Why does Honerva want him? She doesn’t seem like mother of the year.”

“Lotor is a product of his parentage,” Acxa snorted. “Personality-wise, but also physiologically. Honerva was in the quintessence field while pregnant, it had a lot of interesting effects. He can still be overstimulated by it but he’s immune to overexposure. If she can figure out what gives him his immunity, she can have an army of alchemists who can pull unlimited power directly from spacetime rifts.”

“Oh good, an army of teenagers with god-like abilities. Clearly she’s never taught a class of thirty average ones or she’d know better.”

Adam had heard enough. He had known it was a good idea to get Lotor away from Honerva as soon as he’d seen the effort she put in to retrieving him, but now it seemed a little more pressing to do so. Whether he would hand him over to Acxa, however, remained to be seen after he had more information later.

“Okay, great, this just got a lot more complicated,” he straightened up and pushed away from the door, heading out into the hall. Now instead of a floor full of druids-in-training they had a floor full of trafficked children. Including Lance, who was under some kind of control as well.

“Wait,” behind him, Acxa was shaking off their conversation. Her voice was hard again, and starting to sound angry. “What did you just do?”

“Started walking,” Adam called back. “You might want to do it too, we probably only have a small window between Lance getting here and Honerva showing up, so—“

He stopped talking when he felt her gun press into his back. He paused, not putting his hands up but turning slightly to glance back at her. Yes, she definitely looked pissed.

“How did you make me say those things?” She demanded. “What did you do to me?”

“Asked questions,” Adam raised an eyebrow, turning a little further to look down at the gun. “I wouldn’t freak out about it too much if I were you, lots of people answer me when I ask questions. I’m just that charming.”

“No, you did something,” she insisted, her camouflage shifting back into place. “You clouded my head, I felt it. What the hell are you?”

“Depending on who you ask, a disappointment or a pain in the ass,” Adam answered dryly. “Possibly a narcissist, but I honestly think my therapist jumped the gun on that one. Put the gun down, Acxa, or I’ll put it down for you. I am _not_ Lance or James.”

He gave her until the mental count of five. To her credit, she lowered the gun as he got to four, saving him from having to waste time reminding her what it was like to go one on one with someone older than twenty.

“Thank you. Now let’s go, we need to grab Lance and see if he can convince some of these kids to come with us. I know he won’t be docking up in the lab if he took any Galra with him, where will they be coming in?”

“Hub Four,” Acxa ground out, shoving past him irritably to lead the way. “And if they’re wormholing, it will be soon. Don’t think this conversation is over, I want answers later.”

“Wow, attitude,” Adam tsked, pulling out his staff just in case. He lightly touched the dog tags through his flight suit and followed, wishing he were anywhere but here.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years ago**_ :

Adam stood with his hands in his pockets, a petite brunette named Melissa hanging off his back with her arms around his neck. She was a senior at the local high school, he had met her half an hour ago over at the apple cider stand and she and her friends had decided to accompany him and his entourage through the attractions.

She was very pretty, wearing that mix of short skirt and knee-high heeled boots Adam liked so much, and she had on Valentina perfume. She and her friends were trying to talk them into going to a Halloween house party at a nearby fraternity after the fair, and Adam was more than willing to let himself be convinced.

They were lined up for the haunted house, seven of them all together, when a handful of other boys from the Garrison fell into line behind them. Melissa had lowered herself down to the ground and was now holding his arm, her free hand playing with his hair while she talked to her friend, and Adam was too occupied to even bother glancing at the new arrivals.

Until he heard a very specific laugh from the back of the line. It simultaneously annoyed him and drew his interest, which pretty much summed up the person making the noise very well.

Adam had noticed Takashi Shirogane in their first year, during a simulator lab that had selected a handful of students from all the flight classes and put them together. Adam had noticed him because Takashi was the first person to tell him ‘no’ in a very long time.

He hadn’t been used to being told no. Sure, he heard it here and there and occasionally he didn’t get his way, but that was fairly rare. If he smiled the right way and said the right things he tended to get what he wanted, it had been that way his entire life and here had been no reason to think it would be any different once he started at the Garrison. One of the ways he practiced getting his own way was by flirting with pretty much anyone who looked his way long enough.

And people usually responded. All sorts of people…girls, boys, adults who obviously felt guilty about it. Sexuality didn't always come into play, being flirtatious and playful didn’t always mean there was attraction. Gay girls and straight boys both responded positively most of the time.

Takashi did not. He had acted annoyed, which Adam had found insulting. He was a fucking _gift_ , how _dare_ somebody not be thankful?

As the years went by, it had only gotten more grating. Adam had made it a point to be very well liked by everyone, but nothing seemed to work when it came to Shirogane. He had changed tactics a while ago, noting that Takashi was one of those over-achievers who was just good at literally everything he tried. Adam had thought that maybe keeping pace was a way to get on the good side of the impossible to impress, but he had apparently been wrong. All that happened was that Takashi got competitive.

And, of course, Adam couldn’t just back down from a challenge once it was there.

Things were a little calmer now. Takashi had been less overtly hostile since Iverson had forced him to change rooms and made them roommates, but it didn’t feel very much like Adam had won. Instead he felt kind of like a zoo exhibit, like Takashi was getting great entertainment out of his life in general. He was often very interested in what Adam was doing, and inserted himself without invitation.

So Adam was not surprised when he felt a sudden weight on is free shoulder and glanced over to find Takashi leaning on it. He was opening a small paper bag with something he’d bought at one of the stands in order to inspect his purchase.

“Why are you in line for a haunted house?” Was all Adam bothered to ask. “You slept with the lights on for a week after I made you watch The Exorcist. This is an actual decommissioned sanitarium, you’re aware of that, right?”

“Personal growth,” Takashi answered indifferently. He fished a necklace out of the bag and held it up. “Look at this. It’s a zodiac dog tag bottle opener. It’s like somebody threw darts at a board filled with random words and then charged ten dollars for it.”

“Oh, you’re a Pisces, that explains so much,” Adam observed, glancing at the monstrosity he was holding up before turning his attention back to the line as it started moving. He actually knew absolutely nothing about the zodiac, but Takashi looked mildly insulted and that was good enough. “You’re also the target idiot who spent ten dollars on it.”

People were being sent through the attraction in groups of three and four. As they reached the front, Adam’s group was split up as his two friends went ahead with two of the girls. Takashi folded up the bag and put it in his pocket but continued to play with his stupid novelty, still leaning on Adam’s shoulder. Adam twisted a little to look back at the group Takashi had come with, spotting two girls and two boys from their year at the Garrison.

“Okay, which one are you trying to impress by making it through this?” He asked, raising an eyebrow. “Because you should know now, this entire thing is going to be jump scares and they’re all going to hear you screaming.”

“It’s people in costumes,” Takashi answered, rolling his eyes. “I think I can handle it.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Besides, you’re one to talk. You hid behind me through half the movie.” Takashi said it loudly, like he could embarrass him. Clearly he was going to have to learn the hard way that Adam didn’t get embarrassed.

“Yes, because I was _scared_ ,” Adam said just as loudly, not caring who heard him. “That’s the point. I like being scared. I paid good money to go in here and lose my shit. I’m probably going to be crying when this is over.”

The guy keeping track of people entering waved the next group in. Melissa headed inside, holding the hand of a friend whose name Adam couldn’t remember. When he followed, Takashi came right along with him. Uninvited, and completely unapologetic about it.

“Don’t you have your own friends?” Adam hissed, stopping and pulling his shoulder out from under Takashi’s arm.

“Yeah, but there’s five of us, tagging along with you is just easier than splitting up,” Takashi answered. “Besides, Jake and Chris are trying to put on a show for the girls and don’t need a fifth wheel. You already hooked one for the night, you can afford an extra person hanging around for ten minutes.”

“Hold on, what did you just say?” Adam asked. “I hooked one for the night? What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know, you have a girl for the evening,” Takashi shrugged. “Just…like you do every other leave weekend.”

“Are you trying to say I’m a man whore?” Adam demanded, glaring at him. Now he was insulted. He wasn’t entirely sure why, since he’d been called worse by plenty of people for quite some time, but having his roommate say it put him on the defensive.

“Shhh,” Takashi motioned with his hands for Adam to quiet down, but Adam was having none of it. “Be quiet.”

“Don’t you shush me, you just called me a-mmph!” Takashi reached over and pressed a hand to Adam’s mouth, which was absolutely infuriating.

“Be quiet for a second!” Takashi insisted. “Listen. Is it supposed to be this quiet in here? And where did the girls go?”

Adam looked as far to the left and right as he could with a hand holding his head still. Melissa and her friend were gone, and it _was_ really quiet.

The sanitarium was an old building, long since out of use but preserved for historical reasons. It had been abandoned for as long as Adam had been alive, at least, and there were some parts that were off limits to the guests due to structural integrity. But the place was huge with plenty of open room to walk, which meant plenty of room to lose people.

They were in a long hallway, heavy doors along one side and windows that looked out into the dark night on the other. There was no way to tell where the girls had gone once he and Takashi had stopped, and the walls here were literally made to drown out screams. He looked up and down the hall, feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

“Great. Long hall, lots of doors. No way this can go badly,” Adam sighed.

He started walking down the hall slowly, keeping his eye on the windows. They looked out into the empty property and nothing was within view in the dark, making it very creepy. They reached the end of the hall, and thankfully the end of the windows, and Adam stopped to carefully peek around the corner. Takashi, who had apparently never set foot inside one of these things before, kept walking blindly around the turn.

A bloody clown with an ax jumped out of an open closet there. Takashi screamed and jumped, Adam screamed and tensed. After a few seconds the clown started to laugh hysterically.

It took Adam a moment to realize he was standing there, frozen in fear, holding the 180 pounds of Japanese cadet that had jumped into his arms. He gave Takashi a long-suffering look.

“Dude…really?”

Takashi blinked and looked down at their embarrassing position, then at the clown who was leaning against the wall from laughing at him so hard, then back up at Adam. He smirked, putting his arms around Adam’s neck and resting his head on his shoulder.

“I’m scared. Hold me,” he teased.

“Oh, for the love of God,” Adam muttered. He thanked every deity he could think of that the hallway was dark and nobody could see the blush creeping across his face.

Adam dropped Takashi onto the floor in a heap, stepping over him and around the very amused clown. Takashi was making noises that were a mixture of pained groans and laughing his ass off, and by the time he managed to calm down enough to get off the floor and catch up Adam was already halfway down the hall and peeking through an open door.

“What is it?” Takashi whispered loudly in Adam’s ear, his breath ghosting across the back of his neck. It made him jump, and at the same time made him blush again.

“Don’t do that,” he hissed, reaching back to smack him in the face without looking. “And it’s a trap, that’s what it is.”

It was an old operating room. White sheets were tossed over the furniture here, leaving outlines of shelves and cabinets, and a gurney in the middle of the room with another sheet. It looked like it had a body.

“Those probably aren’t cabinets,” Adam whispered. “It’s probably just frames, with people hiding under the sheets. They figure you’ll avoid the gurney in the middle and get close enough for them to jump out at you. It’s likely just a mannequin.”

“If you say so,” Takashi sounded uncertain. He was probably really regretting coming in here, and Adam supposed he couldn’t really blame him. He’d made Takashi watch a few horror movies so far, the guy didn’t do well with things like jump scares or suspenseful music.

Adam took a deep breath and stepped into the room first. He moved very slowly, keeping an eye on the outlines of the cabinets in the dark. The room was only lit by fake lanterns set up around it, the flickering light casting eerie shadows. He found himself tiptoeing, as if maybe making no noise would help him get through unscathed.

He went around one side of the gurney, Takashi went around the other. They continued to move slowly, both of them starting to get tense, each watching the cabinets they were close to in preparation. They were almost past the gurney when Adam felt Takashi take his hand.

“Pfft, the dark finally get to you?” He asked.

“Me? You’re the one being clingy,” Takashi scoffed.

They both turned to look at each other at the same time, only to find that the body on the gurney had sat up. There was a zombie holding their hands.

They both screamed as one this time, taking off running at the same time. They ended up knocking together in the doorway, nearly ending up in a pile on the floor before they untangled themselves and took off down a new hallway. This time they didn’t have a moment to compose themselves before a guy in a hockey mask with a chainsaw lunged out of the shadows, setting them both off again.

There really was no end to it after that. The sanitarium itself was creepy, but with so little light it was even worse. At one point they were herded into some kind of conference room that had been set up like a house of mirrors, which turned out to be a nightmare. The angles of the reflective surfaces made it impossible to tell what direction things were coming from, and if he was looking at something real or a reflection. It was very easy to get separated, which happened immediately, and the damn room was full of people in terrifying costumes just waiting to jump out.

Adam ran into three mirrors and one wall before he finally slammed into Takashi, who was also screaming and running full tilt. He ended up on the floor, briefly wondering if he had a concussion, then Takashi grabbed his hand and hauled him up. Adam held on tightly so they didn’t get separated again as they tore out of the maze and into another dark hallway.

The rest of the thing was a blur. At some point they made it out, alive and in one piece except for Adam’s bloody nose from slamming into a wall, and both collapsed on the grass outside.

“That was _horrible_ ,” Takashi groaned into the ground, his voice unusually high pitched.

“Yeah, isn’t it great?” Adam asked around panting for breath, rubbing his chest. “What does a heart attack feel like?”

He started to push himself up, and realized he was still holding Takashi’s hand. Releasing it hastily, he sat up on his knees and brushed himself off, trying to smooth down his hair. Across the way, he could see his friends and the girls splayed out in the grass recovering from their own trip through. Next to him Takashi sat up, running a hand through his own hair. He looked pale, which was really saying something since he had a light complexion anyway.

He should not have gone through that house, Adam knew. There were warnings posted all over the place about how bad it was, and even an age minimum. Takashi looked like he was going to be sick, and Adam could only imagine how nauseous the other boy must feel given that he felt like he was going to throw up himself even though he actually enjoyed being scared.

Takashi was his roommate now, but not his responsibility. He was seventeen, he could make his own decisions and deal with the effects. Still, Adam found himself sighing in annoyance as he got to his feet.

“I’m going back to the dorms,” he said without preamble. “I think I had enough for tonight, I’m gonna pick up a pizza and go watch Hocus Pocus. Five minutes, if you’re coming along be out in the parking lot.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, heading across the grass to go tell the others he was leaving. As he walked he felt something tickle his fingers and looked down to find a chain wrapped around his hand. It was Takashi’s stupid dog tag bottle opener, he’d had it wrapped around his wrist and it had likely made its way over to Adam’s as they’d run while they were still holding hands. He rolled his eyes and unwound it from his hand, dropping the chain around his neck as he walked and tucking the tag under his shirt. If Takashi really wanted it back he could pay a ransom for it later.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

There was too much going on for anybody to look twice at Adam as they walked through the hall to Hub Four, especially since he was with Acxa. As they moved he could feel the faint vibration running through the outpost of a stray shot hitting one of the hubs as the fighting began getting closer. It was only a matter of time—probably less than half a varga at most—before the battle reached the outpost and the Honor soldiers started coming aboard.

“You said Lance’s ship might be wormholing?” Adam asked Acxa as they reached Hub Four and headed for the loading docks. “How does that work?”

“There’s another ship docked in orbit, it follows the planet and stays between it and the sun so that it can’t be seen with the light backdrop,” Acxa answered. “It has a thing called a teludav, it works on Altean alchemy to create wormholes. Usually they only use it once their ships are away from the system, so nobody will see it and know there are Alteans nearby…that’s why Honerva and Lance both made their trips under engine power. Wormholes aren’t supposed to be a thing anymore.

“By now they would have called for Lance’s coordinates and opened a wormhole that would leave his shuttle nearby while everyone is distracted by the fighting.”

Even as she was answering they reached the dock, which was empty thanks to cowards taking any ships available and fleeing. There was a shuttle docking, but as he and Acxa approached it Adam glanced out one of the windows and saw something that made him freeze.

Out by Hub Three, where he could see the shuttle still parked at the lab with James and Romelle, Honerva’s cruiser was already arriving through a wormhole of its own.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In light of the clusterf*ck that is S8, have some klance feels and big-brother-ly Adam.

Lansar sat in the copilot seat of the shuttle, his demeanor making it clear he didn’t welcome conversation. They all still wore their camouflage in the presence of the Fire guards Honerva had sent with them but that still didn’t hide the way his face kept going red. He was trying to think about the outpost, about what needed to be done when they got there, but his mind kept drifting back to his run-in with Yorak.

Yorak wasn’t his real name, of course, Lansar knew that, but he liked the sound of it better than ‘Kogane.’ He liked this overall image better, the tunic and the ponytail and the haphazard blue pigment that made the purple of his eyes seem brighter. The whole picture was softer than the armored soldier he knew of, gentler.

_Who’s Keith?_

_Your boyfriend. Sort of. It’s complicated._

_He’s not my boyf—ugh, can we talk or not?_

_You weren’t, at that point. I decided you were after you kicked my ass wearing my armor._

_I just like it when you wear my things. And I think you’re cute when you’re bossy._

Lansar was no stranger to sarcasm in tense situations, he knew when words were meant to be cutting. But nothing about the private meeting in the quiet office had been sarcastic, Yorak’s words had been in turns playful and sincere. And even if Lansar didn’t think the words themselves were genuine, the other’s actions had been.

He had been so confused as to why Yorak would simply give up in the stairwell of the Atlas, just close his eyes and wait for the trigger to be pulled. He’d been equally confused when the other boy had disarmed himself on the balcony, left the weapons within Lansar’s easy reach and lowered his defenses. Now he had been given an answer.

_I love you. I’m_ in love _with you._

Lansar felt his face starting to grow warm again. He pulled the hood of his cloak forward and squeezed it closed, effectively wrapping it around his blushing face as he slouched down low in his seat.

_Promise me you’ll come back to me_.

He had been trying very hard not to think about the kiss, but his mind finally—inevitably—conjured up the memory. It had been so soft, with so much feeling behind it. Lansar remembered the way Yorak had looked at him as he’d pulled away slightly, the softness in his eyes, and that made his pulse quicken more than the thought of the kiss itself.

It hurt. It was a sort of emptiness that hadn’t been there earlier, like now that he knew what belonged there he missed it.

He had a jarring thought that brought with it an almost physical shock. To suddenly go from having nothing, no connection to anyone, to remembering this feeling, it was like being locked away in the dark and having a window thrown open to let in the sun. It dawned on him now why he had been unable to pull the trigger in the stairwell, and why he’d had no interest in picking up the gun off the balcony wall.

_I think I love him, too. And I’ve kissed him before._

The memory was faint but it was there, an arm around his middle pulling him gently back as he tried to walk by, lips pressing shyly against his own as they leaned back against a row of lockers. They had a date, their first date, they were supposed to go for coffee. They were supposed to have a quiet evening to finally have a long overdue talk.

Lansar let go of the hood, letting it spring back open, and looked at the viewscreens. He watched the colors change as they left the planet’s atmosphere, moving out of its twilight zone and out into the darkness of space. He looked at nothing in particular and wondered what that would be like, sitting in a human coffee shop across from a Galra. Would Yorak be unwelcome there after the occupation by Sendak? Would the yellow of his eyes and the stripes on his face make people wary?

Allura had been wary at first, back at the Castle, and that had been when Keith had still been a fluffy, raging little bundle of kitten-ish anger with no telltale Galra features. Now he looked like he could break someone’s spine in two with his bare hands, and even though he was much more calm and in control than he had once been in the end it was looks that mattered when people were scared.

Lansar felt the soft vibrations of the suppressors and sighed, not even bothering to fight it. He let the cool sensation wash over his mind, leaving it momentarily blank, and when he was able to focus again he looked back out the window at the shuttle’s approach of open space.

He wondered if Yorak was back at his ship yet, or if he was still waiting out on the balcony, watching the festival below until he was sure Honerva’s shuttle had left orbit. He could picture him leaning up against the balcony wall where Lansar had been standing, Yorak's arms resting lightly around him to urge him not to try to run…

Lansar sat up suddenly, forgetting about the view outside. He mentally went over the events of the last hour in quick succession; landing, going upstairs, being caught, Yorak disarming himself, the argument, being pinned, the kiss, his promise to come back.

It was all there. Every moment, every feeling, was intact and clear as crystal.

There was something else he knew was gone, some accompanying thoughts the suppressors had cleared away, but he was okay with that. Because he remembered all of _this_.

“Sir, we just got a call in from the _Lorelia_ ,” Lansar’s thoughts were interrupted by Haran as the other Altean leaned over his chair to speak to him softly. “The Honor faction is moving in to attack the outpost. Camille says they were keeping an eye on an advance party that started a scuffle, but now the full fleet seems to be moving in.”

“As soon as our backs are turned,” Lansar said in disgust. “Did they also contact Honerva?”

“They did. She’ll likely return quickly, the crystal and Lotor are still at the outpost, along with our other mech. Camille is requesting permission to open a wormhole to return us now.”

Lansar glanced back at everyone else in the shuttle, at the clueless faces of the Galra crew and the worried expressions of the Alteans. They all wanted to be druids, to serve an empress and hopefully follow her into glory, but now that the chips were down none of them knew what to do. Even Haran and Natille, who were about Lansar’s age, were jumpy and at a loss now that a real battle might be on the horizon.

But that was why he was here.

“Put the Galra in the airlock,” he ordered softly.

He didn’t have to say anything else, Haran disappeared to do as asked. Lansar remained where he was as the brief struggle went down, only rising once the pilot’s seat was empty and open. He shrugged off the cloak and followed Haran to the back of the shuttle, waiting for the three Galra soldiers to be safely stowed in the airlock where they couldn’t attack when they realized they were surrounded by Alteans.

Or so the others assumed. Lansar, however, stepped forward and hit the control to open the outer airlock, disposing of all three.

The others looked shocked, but he didn’t feel any guilt over it. They were soldiers voluntarily serving the Galra empire, which meant they had voluntarily killed and oppressed more people than Lansar had ever even met, and the relatively quick end was more than they deserved.

“Tell Camille she has permission to open us a wormhole,” Lansar ordered Haran as he returned to the pilot seat. “And tell her to prep the Lorelia to move in on my command.”

They were now approaching their final hours at the Fire of Purification outpost, and Lansar knew it. Honerva had already gotten rid of the handful of Galra who had been trustworthy enough to be made aware that Haggar was keeping some Alteans, and they no longer had any with them to witness anything. He transmitted their coordinates to the Lorelia, and within a few minutes the glowing blue light of a wormhole opened up in front of them.

It was Camille’s work, very different from the darkly lit ones used by Honerva and thought by the Galra to simply be her druidic magic. It let them out on the far side of the planet, out of view of the outpost and any opposing faction attackers. Lansar set a course for Hub Four, pulling up a view of the Honor fleet on the viewscreen.

“How many Alteans do we have still at the outpost?” He asked Farla, who had taken up the co-pilot seat and was working the comms. “Honerva took the older ones to help her unload the mech, should only be a handful left, right?”

“Ten,” Farla answered. “Camille, Vylar, and Keera on the _Lorelia_. Ariella, Kildar, Alise, and Magnis should be packing up the labs, and Denvar, Paylan, and Sendor are clearing out the offices.”

He noticed no one spoke up to correct her and point out that Romelle was still there as well. So much for loyalty to blood.

“Natille, go to the office level when we arrive,” Lansar commanded. “Haran, to the labs. Gather everyone and bring them to Hub Four, if Honerva arrives we need to leave the docking stations open for the cruiser, they’ll want to pack up the lab. Farla, Tiselle, you and I will be clearing a path from Four to Three and keeping the way clear for the kids to get through, I don’t think some of them will be steady enough in all the chaos to keep up camouflage for long. When everybody’s there, we’ll call in the Lorelia and make an exit.”

He docked the shuttle and rose to follow the others, pulling his gun from the holster. As he did, his fingers brushed something that felt out of place, and he tugged it off to find a small, metallic disc with a tiny, flashing green light.

A tracker.

Yorak’s, undoubtedly. Probably put there at some point during the pat down, in case Lansar had escaped. He started to toss it onto the console to leave behind but changed his mind, turning it off and slipping it into his pocket instead. He had promised to go back and he intended to keep his promise, but if something happened then he trusted Yorak when he’d said he’d always come find him.

Lansar had to trust someone, this was where he would start.

“Honerva’s arriving,” Tiselle called back into the shuttle. “Good thing we didn’t block the docking stations.”

“No, but somebody did,” Lansar observed as he stepped off the shuttle. There was another docked at one of the airlocks, he couldn’t see well from here but he could just make out the small ship.

“That would be me.”

Lansar looked away from the window to find Acxa approaching. She wasn’t alone, she had some guy with her who obviously wasn’t Galra. From the color of his skin and his features it was possible he was another Altean who was hiding his colors, but it was pretty hard to tell through the glaring… _everything_ that made it difficult to focus on any one thing. He was tall, pretty, and his face highly decorated, and as he moved his eyes seemed to catch and reflect the light of the landing bay.

Lansar opened his mouth to speak but Natille and Haran were suddenly shoving past him, weapons drawn as they went at the new arrival. Rather than look threatened, the man took a step back and actually smiled, bringing up a hand to hold up something that stopped them in their tracks.

“Ah ah ah, young’uns,” he warned, showing them all what looked like some kind of detonator. “Not saying I’m unstable enough to kill us all if you don’t chill out, but if we’re being honest it’s probably a mistake to say I’m not.”

“Wait…Adam, what is that?” Acxa asked, looking alarmed. “Did you set a bomb somewhere?”

“I set bombs everywhere,” Adam answered a little too casually. “And they’re not even good bombs, to be honest. So seriously, there’s a non-zero chance we’ll all be on fire within the next varga. You, eldest Child of the Corn over there. Here.”

He crooked a finger at Lansar, motioning for him to step forward.

The whole scenario was so utterly ridiculous Lansar could only be confused and mildly annoyed as he did as requested. He wasn’t sure why Haran and Natille reacted the way they did, but he didn’t find Adam to be terribly threatening. He was very…colorful, that was for certain, and as Lansar got closer he decided the man was probably human under that diadem that covered his ears.

That sort of explained the absolute insanity of setting explosives on a space station. Humans in general didn’t strike him as being completely mentally stable.

As Lansar came to a stop in front of him. Adam looked him over thoughtfully.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Uh, breakfast?” Lansar was so caught off guard his answer came out as a question.

“So they’re not starving you? Not hurting you? Are you sleeping okay? Blink twice if you’re being held hostage,” Adam requested.

“I—”

“Not now,” Acxa hissed, invading the strange meeting and turning it into something akin to a three-person huddle. “Of course he’s a hostage, but I told you, he doesn’t even remember you. Can we please keep on target?”

“Target is really a terrible word to use when there’s literally a fleet of ships bearing down on us with cannons aimed, but sure,” Adam said graciously.

“We need to get any of those kids we can convince to go and get them off this base before Honerva docks,” Acxa said. “Natille is not going to go along with us, I can tell you that right now. She’s completely loyal to Honerva. So is Haran. The three who are crewing the cloaked ship nearby are older, nineteen and twenty, so they’re not as impressionable and they’re on the fence about all of this.”

Lansar looked back and forth between the two of them, eyebrows raised, not entirely certain how he’d even come to be invited into this conversation.

“I have a question,” he interjected, raising his hand.

“What?”

“You both do realize I have four jumpy Alteans with guns and that I will have you both shot if somebody doesn’t tell me what’s going on, right?” Lansar asked, raising the gun he was still holding and leveling it at Adam.

“See, that’s the kind of attitude you pick up hanging around Kogane,” Adam answered. “I have to say, I’m disappointed but not surprised. He’s a really bad influence.”

“Not a good time!” Acxa groaned.

“Don’t tell me how or when to parent my wayward charge,” Adam replied, tossing the detonator up in the air toward Acxa for her to catch.

Lansar’s eyes instinctively followed the detonator, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Something slammed the back of his knee and the world flipped over, and at the same time he felt his weapon removed from his hand. The next thing he knew he was lying on his back with the sharp end of a staff pressed against his neck and a foot on his chest, and his gun was being aimed at Tiselle and Farla. Acxa had her own weapon leveled at Natille and Haran.

“Okay, listen up,” Adam’s whole demeanor changed drastically now that he had the upper hand, far more imposing and serious. “There’s a fleet of Galra cruisers moving in on this outpost, and landing parties will be moving in within half a varga. All Alteans need to be evacuated immediately.”

“That’s exactly what we were about to do.” It was Tiselle who spoke up, trying to sound confident though she came off as timid. “We have a ship that’s orbiting nearby, we’re going to go gather the others and bring them down here to be picked up.”

“Good, that makes this easier,” Adam answered. “But from here forward we’re taking over. You won’t be following Honerva when you leave this outpost, you’ll be following Lotor. Acxa will stay here and coordinate your evac, she’ll give the ship crew orders on where to go. You’ll be getting away from this outpost, and then Lotor’s shuttle will be docking with you when you’re far enough.”

Acxa didn’t look very certain to Lansar, and he was pretty sure he knew why. As far as he knew, Lotor was still in the healing pod in cryosleep and nobody would be following him anywhere. Surely Acxa knew that as well, but from the sound of it Farla and Tiselle were eager to believe.

Lansar shot Acxa a questioning look. She nodded ever so slightly, and he decided he would go with this for now. They seemed to be trying to get the kids away from Honerva, which was exactly what he wanted to do himself. He raised his hands in surrender.

“Farla, Tiselle, follow Acxa’s orders,” he relented. “Natille, Haran, hand over your weapons and go start evacuating the others.”

“Lance and I will be joining you,” Adam declared, removing the staff from Lansar’s neck. “Just to make sure you behave.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Lansar heard Acxa whisper.

“Oh, honey, I’ve never had a good idea in my life,” Adam whispered back. “But I’ve never let that stop me before.”

Lansar got up when Adam removed the foot from his chest, gently rubbing the sore spot. Adam didn’t give him his gun back, not that he expected him to, and Acxa disarmed Haran and Natille. Farla and Tiselle didn’t even need to be asked, they were already putting their weapons away and rushing to unload the mech parts from the shuttle.

“Acxa, use the radio in the shuttle here to call James and Romelle, tell them to leave right now. You three, walk,” Adam ordered, motioning with the gun. Acxa passed him back the detonator, which he put into the pocket of the flight suit he wore.

Natille and Haran glared at him but started to cross the loading dock. Lansar followed behind them as they left the hangar and passed into a hallway of offices. Anyone who had intended to flee was already gone and this hall was empty, but Adam stopped them all as they came to an open office.

“Inside,” he motioned to Natille and Haran.

Lansar stayed back, watching with some curiosity as the two Alteans glared at Adam again but did as asked. Adam followed them in, and before they could react he pulled out what Lansar recognized as Acxa’s taser. He hit them both with it, then pulled the door closed and fired his gun at the lock pad.

Lansar didn’t need to ask what he was doing. These doors would be keyed to open for Galra only, Natille and Haran would not be coming back out of that office. He felt a slight pang of guilt. Technically they were his people, he should be standing with them. But he also knew how loyal they were to Honerva and that they couldn’t be trusted. But Adam hadn’t killed them and at least this way they had a chance, someone would find them eventually and they could camouflage themselves to survive.

Adam turned to him next, and he waited to see if he was going to get tazed as well. Instead, Adam reached up to wipe some of the colored swatches from his face with his sleeve, leaving dark circles visible under his eyes as he tiredly offered Lansar his gun back.

“Acxa already told me about your memory,” he said as Lansar took the weapon. “I’m not going to bother with any heartfelt pleas for you to remember me. I’m just going to say that I know you’re a good kid and I know that you always try to do the right thing…I’m not asking you to trust me or to not be suspicious of me, I’m just asking you to work with me until the Alteans are evacuated from this outpost and on their way somewhere safe. So I’d really appreciate it if you’d try to contain whatever urge you might get to shoot me in the back.”

Adam turned and started walking, not even waiting to see if he would agree. Lansar frowned and started following, tugging up his sleeve to look at the messy writing he knew was there, going over the names. Keith, Allura, Hunk, Shiro, Pidge… _Adam_.

“Hey,” he called speeding up to catch up. “Hey! You know me, right? I know you? How?”

Adam looked back at him, eyebrows raising. He hesitated, looking as though he didn’t want to say anything, but after a moment he gave in.

“…I met you when you were stripping,” he said somberly.

“Wait, when I was _what_?” Lansar choked.

“Yeah, you’d just turned sixteen but you had a really good fake ID that said you were nineteen. It was at a club called, um, Star…bright…Tango…I don’t know. Some dumb shit name like that, I guess. Whatever. The point is you were way too young for what you were doing on that pole.”

“Oh my God,” Lansar mumbled, feeling his face go red. He had noticed he was really flexible, but he hadn’t imagined it was because he had been an underaged stripper. “Oh…oh God.”

“Relax, it’s fine, I didn’t tell anyone,” Adam answered. He started coughing and had to turn his head, covering his face with his arm. It sounded bad. “Just, you know. You might not want to mention to anyone that I told you that. Ever.”

They came to the hall that led from Hub Four to Hub Three, weaving through the people rushing back and forth. Lansar felt the floor shift under his feet and almost fell, stopping to look out the window at the bright light of lasers against the black of space. The battle had reached the outpost and stray shots were starting to hit the structure. Adam took one look out at the approaching fight and started running, shoving larger Galra out of his way. They made it through to Hub Three and Lansar opened the door for them to head up to level three, his ears ringing in the sudden quiet when the door closed behind them to leave the crowds behind.

“We need a way to get the younger kids from here to Hub Four,” Lansar said as they bounded up the stairs. “They can’t hold camouflage for long yet, especially if they’re in a panic. There’s too many Galra out there for it to be safe.”

“Get them into flight suits,” Adam suggested as they came out of the stairwell. “They should all have them for travel. Put the face screens down, walk them through the crowds. There’s about to be a lot more panic out there, nobody’s going to pay attention.”

Lansar nodded, looking up and down the hall. He could hear rustling in some rooms as the kids continued doing their job of packing everything to go in the absence of any other orders.

“Denvar!” He called. “Paylan, Sendor! Quarters, now!”

The three boys appeared a moment later, pausing to look curiously at Adam. Lansar ordered them to get a move on, following them up to the residential floor and sending them to their quarters to get flight suits. A small group of Alteans were already here, huddled together. Alise, Ariella, Kildar, and Magnis were not very happy to see Adam, who Alise claimed had broken her staff earlier.

Lansar didn’t have time to get that whole story. He sent them to their quarters and ran to his own, throwing open drawers and pulling out the guns he’d taken from the Atlas. He shoved them into a bag and ignored Adam as he quickly stripped down and pulled on the red Paladin armor he’d taken, grabbing the sketch of him and the Red Lion from where it was taped to the wall.

He’d thought he knew who had drawn it before now, but after his run-in with Yorak he was certain. He folded it carefully, tucking it down into his breastplate where it would be safe.

He was missing a bracer and didn’t have a helmet, both of those had been lost in the fight in the Atlas’ memory chamber, so he took the helmet from the flight suit he’d been using here. As far as his unarmored arm, he’d just have to be careful.

The seven kids were in the hallway waiting for him when he came out, shifting around nervously. As Lansar made his way to meet them he felt the hub move with a familiar vibration. Looking up at Adam he knew the other man felt it and recognized it too: Honerva’s cruiser had docked.

“Screens down,” Lansar ordered, opening the door to the stairwell. “Everybody stick together, okay? If you can camouflage as Galra, then do it. If not, keep your head down. It’s crazy down there so stay close, hold hands if you have to. Don’t stop, no matter what. Everyone down there is panicking, they don’t have time to stop and look at you unless you give them a reason.”

“Yeah, they’re going to be too busy looking at you,” Adam pointed out. “Isn’t that Paladin armor? Even I know that and I’ve literally been in a hole for more than a year.”

The whole hub suddenly shook hard enough to throw them off their feet. They all scrambled to get back up, clinging to the stair rail as it shook again. There was no question about it now, the outpost was directly under attack.

“Yeah, I don’t think it matters that much right now,” Lansar answered, opening the door. He shifted his features to Galra purple and added some facial stripes, just in case. The helmet hid his ears so he wasn’t too worried there.

He grabbed Ariella and Kildar, who had both managed to camouflage themselves to at least appear to be Galra children. The others were doing their best to concentrate on the same, following closely with Adam bringing up the rear. True to prediction, what few people were left in Hub Three were either looting offices or trying to find places to hide and nobody paid them much mind. They reached the hall and Adam used a gloved hand to open the door, and as soon as Lansar stepped through a shudder went through Hub Three and the lights went out.

He stopped to look back, frowning at the purple sparks that ran across the walls and floor in the dark. That was quintessence, as if Honerva had just cast some kind of big spell.

“Uh, okay,” Adam piped up, waving for them to all move faster. “Go. Go go go. There is a very angry witch upstairs right now, move fast. Faster.”

“What did you do?” Lansar hissed, narrowing his eyes to glare back at Adam as he waved the kids ahead of them at a run. “Whatever she just did killed the power to the whole damn hub, she’s got to be blowing a gasket right now.”

“I did nothing she didn’t deserve,” Adam said simply.

They didn’t have to open the door, the Galra who had been on their way to Hub Three changed direction when the lights went out, and the crowd carried them all along with it. Once he was through Lansar stopped at the fork that would lead to the loading docks, doing a head count as smaller Alteans ran past him. Seven in all, everyone accounted for.

When they reached the end of the hall and burst out into the hangar, Lansar saw the Lorelia already docked at the open airlock. Acxa was waiting impatiently with Tiselle, who ran forward to hug the younger kids as they arrived safely. She started ushering them into the safety of the ship.

As the last one stepped through the airlock, everything shook violently. Lansar hit the floor, hard, his gun falling out of his hands and sliding across the floor.

“Sorry,” Adam groaned from where he lay near Acxa. He held up the detonator, shaking it slightly. “Seriously, those were handmade. I didn’t think they’d pack that much punch.”

“Did you seriously just set off bombs on a space station?” Acxa sounded like she was ready to commit a murder as she pushed herself up, her hair down in her face thanks to her clip coming loose and letting it fly free. “What kind of _idiot_ —”

“Do you want more Galra showing up here?” Adam cut her off, already scampering to his feet. “Because the commercial district is the first place that will be boarded by Honor soldiers and they would make their way here fast. So shut your mouth, grab your barrette, and get on the ship. Did you call James?”

“He said he was just waiting for Romelle, she said she had to go check something out,” Acxa answered. “The shuttle’s gone now, she must’ve made it back.”

While they were going back and forth, Lansar pushed himself up and grabbed his gun. He looked out the window to see smoke filtering up from both sides, and when he went over for a closer look he could see it wasn’t just the two hallways. All five hubs had been disconnected, which would probably be fine in the short term but would be a disaster in the long run as they either floated apart or into each other.

Either way, Lansar couldn’t say it was their problem. The people here were killers, they weren’t innocent.

He turned to head over to the ship when he felt the crackling on the air, the faint sizzle of concentrated quintessence being used nearby. He felt the shiver run down the back of his neck as Honerva appeared, and she was visibly pissed.

“Take off!” Lansar yelled, waving for the other two to get on the ship and go. He leveled his gun and took aim at Honerva. “Get them out of here, now!”

“Hurry up and get on!” He heard Acxa yelling to him.

“Someone has to keep her here, just go!” Lansar insisted.

He got off two shots but it was like Honerva wasn’t even there. One second he had a solid target and the next she was a wisp of shadow, his laserfire hit the far wall and dissipated along the metal. Lansar felt the floor shake as the Lorelia started to disengage, and then an unsteady feeling as the force of the departing ship gave the disconnected hub enough of a push to start it moving. Before he could regroup Honerva appeared in front of him, grabbing him by the throat and slamming him back against the wall.

He could feel the crackle of quintessence running over his body, the sting of pain in his head as she forced the dark energy through him in anger. The specialized armor channeled most of it around his body instead of through it, but the missing helmet was definitely a disadvantage.

“Where is Lotor?” She asked.

“I don’t know,” Lansar managed to choke out, an answer that she clearly didn’t like. She tightened her hold, her fingernails digging into the sides of his neck. “I don’t know! I didn’t even know he was gone until two doboshes ago!”

“I saved your miserable life,” Honerva hissed. “The quintessence field gave you an unbelievable gift, burned the impurities of humanity out of you and gave you the blood of a chosen people. Yet you spit in my face after I welcome you into my flock where you belong. The universe offers you everything, and you continue fighting to remain nothing.”

She tightened her hold and the burning got worse. Lansar tried to pry her hand away from his throat but she was strong, stronger than he was at this point even if he was able to put up a decent fight.

“You are a failed experiment,” Honerva informed him coldly. “I helped return some of your memory to you and I can permanently remove it again as well. Perhaps it’s time to wipe you completely clean and start you over from scratch. Then, when you’re ready to be obedient to me and true to your real people, you will clean up this mess and find my son.”

He felt her pressing into his mind, like claws digging into him deeply, trying to draw blood. Lansar had no idea what was going on here, he didn’t know what had happened to Lotor or what else had happened before his arrival, all he knew right now was that Romelle and Acxa were working with others to get the Alteans here away from this crazy witch’s manipulative control. He couldn’t let himself fall under that spell again and become the one to track them down and drag them back.

Lansar pushed back with everything he had, but Honerva wasn’t a half-trained child. She had ten thousand years of power and experience behind her, and she obliterated every wall he tried to put up. He could feel things slipping away, not gently fading like the effects of the suppressors but being erased completely, ripped apart beyond salvation. Relief only came when something metal slammed into the back of Honerva’s head from behind.

The fire in his head died down but the grip on his neck remained as the diadem that had struck her rolled across the floor. Honerva turned a bit to look across the loading dock, to where Adam stood with Lansar’s dropped gun leveled at her. The Lorelia was putting distance between itself and the outpost, visible through the closed airlock as it left the base’s vicinity, but the idiot had stayed behind.

“Leave him alone.” The whine of the gun powering up to fire accompanied his words. “I’m not going to tell you twice.”

“And there you are as well, my runaway project,” Honerva answered mockingly. Lansar choked as she tightened the hold on his neck again, dragging him away from the wall. “I’ll deal with you later, but I strongly suggest you put down the weapon and make things easier on yourself when I do.”

The gun fired with no further warning, and Lansar found himself thrown across the floor so Honerva could dodge out of the way. He rolled, coughing and sucking in deep breaths, and scrambled to is feet looking around for a weapon. Honerva was dodging all of Adam’s shots and throwing some of her own, and being forced to duck and dodge wasn’t improving his aim.

Adam skidded to a stop and lined up a shot, but when he fired Honerva was gone in a whisper of shadow. She reappeared behind him, throwing an arm around his neck in a choke hold and making him drop the gun. He kicked it out of his way so he could get a better hand-to-hand stance and slammed an elbow back into her gut, flipping her forward and onto her back.

From there Adam’s maneuvers became defensive or avoidance. He seemed like he was sick or in pain, and she was faster and stronger than he was. Honerva had a clear advantage of equipment as well, clad in light armor while Adam wore only a flight suit.

Lansar spotted the dropped staff a few yards away and grabbed it, sliding it across the floor toward the fighters. Adam ducked a swing that left a glowing purple trail of quintessence on the air, just barely saving himself from taking it in the face, and rolled forward to grab the staff. The addition of the weapon put Honerva on guard, and gave Lansar the opportunity to spring forward.

He crossed the hangar in a sprint, sliding to his knees to grab the gun from the floor and aim upward at Honerva’s back. He got off two shots in the chaos but she had seen him moving, and she was gone before he’d even finished pulling the trigger.

Instead it was Adam who flew backward and skidded across the docking bay floor, leaving streaks of blood from lasershot wounds he hadn’t seen coming and hadn’t been able to duck. His body hit a metal storage container and lay still.

In the shock of killing with friendly fire, Lansar froze up. He lost track of Honerva, and a the whole room tilted precariously as a blast that was likely from a cruiser canon hit one of the hub’s upper floors. The lighting stayed on but it started to flicker, and the ever-present hum of life support systems that had always sung in the background began to wind down. Lansar dropped his gun and started toward Adam, but he was slammed in the side by a blast that sent him flying heavily into the far wall by the airlock.

Before he could recover Honerva had him again, pressing him back against the wall with a forearm against his neck. She wasn’t flustered, she wasn’t even breathing heavy, nothing they’d thrown at her so far had even fazed her. He felt her dig into his head again, pushing away any attempt he made to defend himself with ease, and he started thrashing desperately for any chance to get loose.

His fingers brushed a panel, the controls for the airlock. He couldn’t see what he was doing but he started pressing the screen, trying to hit some control that would make something of use happen.

An alarm started to blare and red light started to flash, a warning that the airlock was preparing to open without anything docked on the other side to keep pressure equalized. He felt Honerva reaching over to cancel the command and tried to fight, but she grabbed his arm where he was missing the bracer and dug her fingernails in. The under-armor kept her from piercing skin, but a sharp pain ran through Lance’s arm as she hit a spot where he’d cut himself while writing on his skin with the pen. The memory of sitting in the shuttle flashed though his head, of carefully drawing out the three letters as if they were the most important word in the world: R E D

_“It’s temperamental and difficult to master_. _It’s faster and more agile than the others, but also more unstable.”_

He couldn’t remember why it was important, that was a memory he had never regained. Only the word, the name, he had never been able to connect it to anything. There were other memories floating around that referenced it, but the entity behind the name was one of those forbidden things that had not been restored by Honerva.

_“Red saved my life numerous times.”_

It was someone. Something. He had a connection to it, it was important. Not just Red itself but the bond, a bond that was so important to him because Red had shared it with someone else before him. Someone he admired, someone he followed. Being worthy of sharing that experience, of taking up that mantle, had been essential, it was a significant part of who he had become.

_“Each of you has forged a bond with your Lion. Tap into it. They will come, from anywhere.”_

Lion. The Lion from the sketch, the ship from the Atlas hangar. Lansar knew this was what he was looking for, knew _she_ was Red, but it was a concept that simply would not stick in his mind. He fought to hold onto it, giving up on pushing back against the invasion in his brain to focus everything he had on clinging to this single, vital detail.

He was the Paladin of the Red Lion. They had a powerful bond, and she would come if he would just remember to call her.

_Red, I need you. More than ever right now,_ he completely ignored the agony in his head, the feeling of everything being stripped away, and focused all of his will on this one thing. _Please!_

Like waking suddenly from a dream, the sounds of the warning alarm going off and the airlocks beginning to open were replaced by a deafening silence. The hold he was fighting against disappeared and Lance stumbled forward, falling to his knees on a smooth sea of volcanic glass. Stars were visible overhead but only very faint, faded in the fiery glow of a frozen sunrise that painted the skies above pink.

He pushed himself to his feet, took a step, fell again as something caught his ankle. His hands clawed at the smooth, shining ground, trying to find purchase as he was pulled backward away from the sun. The solid surface beneath him gave way and he started to sink, pulled down as if being swallowed by quicksand no matter how hard he fought. Tendrils of shadow reached up to pull him down further, wrapping around his arms and neck, pulling him back into Honerva’s grasping clutches. He reached out desperately looking for something, anything to hold onto, to try and pull himself free.

A hand caught his and held it tightly, starting to pull him back out of the darkness.

The glowing eyes he looked up into were cold and unfriendly, hardened by the same years that had left the golden brown skin of her face burned and scarred, framed by a mane of wild reds and oranges. She didn’t look down at him but past him, as if her gaze could pierce the force trying to pull him in and see what stood on the other side.

Her lips curved ever so slightly into a predatory smirk, and Lance felt a wave of fire run over his skin. It tore across the surface in a current of warmth, burning away the coils of shadow that dared to infringe on her space. Lance felt more than heard the scream, a mixture of pain and fury as Honerva went up against a sentient piece of forever on its own turf and lost miserably.

Lance found himself on solid ground again, panting in exertion from the last few minutes. But it wasn’t over; before he could even look around properly the glass below him shattered and left him free-floating above nothing.

He opened his eyes to the rush of air flying past, a burning in his throat as oxygen was sucked away from him before he could take any in. The airlock was open and pulling out anything that wasn’t nailed down, Lance fumbled with his free hand to close the screen of his helmet so he could finally take in some air. He was outside of the dock, off to the side as everything flew past, held in place by a firm grip.

Lance craned his head up to find Adam standing at the edge of the air lock one arm wrapped around a support rail and the other clinging tightly to Lance’s hand. Even through his helmet screen he looked pale and strained.

A striker flew past, so close Lance was shocked it didn’t hit him, drawing his attention to the battle raging around the outpost. The hub they were clinging to was missing half of its top floors, and was drifting away from the rest thanks to the blows from cannon fire. Lance could feel the rush of air beginning to slow as the loading dock emptied, its power finally dying completely and the lights going out.

Adam pulled Lance back to the opening of the airlock, but the gravity generators had gone offline at some point as well so there was no footing to get there. He caught hold of the support rail and looked into the dark, just in time to see the flickering of purple light as Honerva began gathering quintessence into an eerily glowing ball. It lit her angry face, the purple shade marred by the red glow that still smoldered on the skin of her arm and hand where she had been holding Lance, and made him feel like he was surrounded by static.

Lance heard Adam curse and then felt himself shoved up against the wall as the older man covered him with his body, and then the light of the fighting outside was blocked by a looming shadow. A cannon fired into the loading dock, tearing through what was left of the hub and leaving Lance to cling to Adam and the rail as the remains they were stuck on split clear in half. When he opened his eyes to see what had just happened he jumped and let out a surprised screech.

They were eye-to-eye with the Sincline.

“That was an accident, but let’s pretend I did it on purpose!” A voice came over the comm line in his helmet, nervous and jumpy.

“Wait… _Romelle_!?”

“No, it’s the Tarlish Fairy!” Romelle exclaimed. “Hurry up and get in here, everything is on fire and I don’t know what I’m doing! The entrance is in the back.”

She turned the mech around, or at least tried to, mostly succeeding in whipping the chunk of outpost with Sincline’s tail and making them even more unsteady. Lance held on tightly, scanning the back of the weapon until he saw the outline of the secondary cockpit entrance.

“There it is,” he pointed out. “And here comes another striker!”

Lance grabbed Adam’s arm and kicked away from the hub, firing his boosters full throttle. He came to a hard stop when he hit the Sincline’s hull, grabbing onto the cockpit door to keep them both from bouncing off. It opened much easier than the one he’d had to force open in the quintessence field, and he and Adam squeezed into the narrow airlock. Romelle already had them moving again as Lance opened the inner door, catching Adam when he started to collapse once back in the presence of gravity.

“I’m fine,” Adam insisted, refusing to put his full weight on Lance’s shoulder.

“You’re still bleeding,” Lance disagreed. He helped him forward to the second cockpit seat, lowering him down behind Romelle. She looked back worriedly, trying to split her attention between the new arrivals and the controls.

“I got them!” She announced to her open communication line, where James heaved a sigh of relief and sank down in his seat.

“Thank God, because you’re terrible at this,” James complained. “I could walk a cat with no attention span through flying better than I can work with you.”

“Well it’s not my fault you’re a terrible teacher!” Romelle defended. “Maybe next time you should fly the giant robot lizard yourself if you think it’s so easy!”

“You wouldn’t fly with Lotor!” James exclaimed. “And the stupid lizard wouldn’t even let me inside!”

“Okay kids, you can continue your honeymoon later,” Acxa’s face blinked up onto the comm lines above James’. “Right now you both need to rendezvous with the Lorelia, Camille will be wormholing us out of here. We’re going to do a couple jumps to try and shake Honerva’s tracking and get out of Galra airspace.”

Lance cast a sideways look at the images on the comm screen, feeling a pang of anger at Acxa as he turned his attention back to checking Adam’s wounds. One of his shots had hit him in the chest but had been blocked somehow by something in his pocket. Lance tried to take it out to see what it was, but he got a nasty shock when he reached in to touch it and decided he’d mind his own business on that one for now.

The other had done considerable damage to his side, leaving his flight suit torn open and stained with blood. The laserfire itself had partially cauterized the wound, so at least it seemed they didn’t have to worry about him bleeding out. Still, the flight suit had been torn open by the blast and that meant Adam had been partially exposed while out in space after the airlock opened, he'd need to be checked out for further problems.

Lance pulled off his other bracer and rolled up the sleeves of his under-armor before trying to get a better look, and was surprised to find that the suppressors had been disarmed and come unlocked. They were occasionally giving off strange red sparks as he pulled them from his wrists and ejected them out of the mech in case the explosives were still viable.

He didn’t really remember much of the last half hour. He knew Honerva had been trying to permanently wipe his memory completely, that he’d tried to fight her and that he’d been losing. Everything else was kind of a blur after that, all he had were impressions of something happening, some event he’d been part of that was simply too big to understand and clearly remember.

“Stop, I said it’s fine,” Adam insisted quietly, finally stirring from what looked like a half-asleep state to push Lance’s hands away as Romelle started to make a very jerky exit. “Move for a minute.”

The cockpit was very narrow, making Red’s look roomy by comparison. Lance flattened himself against the wall and let Adam get up, wincing in sympathy as the older pilot moved to kneel next to Romelle. He closed his eyes for a minute, frowning.

"Is she saying anything to you?" He asked Romelle, opening his eyes.

"Nope," Romelle said quickly. "Not a thing."

"The glowy rock says you're lying."

"The glowy rock is a--" Romelle cut off speaking directly to Adam, and instead leaned down to talk at his flight suit pocket. "You're a dirty tattle-tail."

"What's the glowy rock?" Lance asked.

"Romelle, it's not that bad," Adam assured her. He reached into his pocket and held up the Infinite Zero core for Lance to see, before tucking it back away.

"Yes it is!" Romelle wailed. "I don't want to get dragged into adventures by a space ship with an attitude!"

Lance felt a surge of relief when he realized they had the Atlas' crystal with them. Everyone was alive, everyone was out, and they had the most important thing he'd taken back. He knew he had a lot to make up for when he finally got back home, if anybody could ever forgive him at all, but at least some of the damage could be undone.

And more than that, he was thankful Adam had been carrying the core when Lance had shot him. If it hadn't absorbed the blast, the other pilot would definitely be dead right now.

Lance sighed and turned to put his hand against the wall of the ship. If he concentrated he could feel it, something there that seemed to move around under the metal like a pulse. It was different from the Lions, and there was more than one of them here.

"This thing wasn't like this when we left it," he frowned. "Maybe it picked up something--some things--while it was floating around in the quintessence field. I'm no expert though. Allura helped build it, we'll have to get it back to her."

"Well, it's not saying anything important in the meantime, just that it doesn't like Lotor," Romelle said dully, petting the console reassuringly. "Which, honestly, same. And it thinks I'm a terrible pilot."

“Because you need to relax,” Adam advised her, lightly resting a hand over hers on the console and moving it to the proper place. “It’s not as difficult as you’re making it, you’re just nervous. Here, that over there is the throttle, you move it forward to increase power and backward to decrease. This lever that moves four ways is the controls…forward to go down, backward to go up, left and right will move you side to side.”

Lance lowered himself tiredly into the second cockpit seat and listened quietly, as the calmer side of Adam came out. This was the teacher, the flight instructor, the calm voice of reason and the gentle encouragement. It was the side he saved mostly for students, while vocally flipping off other adults in the same breath.

It didn’t escape his notice that Adam’s free hand was pressed against his wound, either. Lance could feel the ache of pulled stitches in his own side, from the knife wound he’d taken on the stairwell of the Atlas. He was also aware of the fact that he was lucid and thinking clearly, but that his memory was still mostly a blank. With the suppressors gone he would likely be able to begin remembering again, but he supposed it would be slow going getting everything back.

“Are we able to make contact with the others?” Lance waited until Romelle had gotten the hang of Adam’s instructions and the were approaching the Lorelia before he interrupted. Romelle shook her head.

“One of the cruisers used some kind of electronic explosion that took down a lot of systems in everything nearby,” she answered. “The short-range works as long as we’re all close enough, but until we can land somewhere and do some fixing none of us has a strong enough signal to call that far.”

Up ahead Lance could see the Lorelia, and a shuttle that was probably carrying James moving in to dock. Once it was safely inside there was only a short pause before a wormhole opened and the ship headed through.

Adam directed Romelle so she could follow, and Lance started to go over their options in his head. They needed a safe place to land where they could make sure the ship was stocked with enough for everyone they now had, they needed somewhere quiet to finally speak to the young Alteans they’d basically kidnapped and make sure they were aware of the truth, and they needed somewhere safe to administer medical treatment wherever needed.

And then, as much as Lance was not looking forward to it, they needed to address the issue of Lotor.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen. I WILL give Curtis an identity, damn it, even if he's not with Shiro here. Screw you, VLD and DW.

_**Current Day**_ :

Shiro stood nervously in the middle of the training deck, waiting for the exercise to begin. He wore his Black Paladin armor, which had been easy enough to adjust to his new arm simply by changing out to a new, full suit of under-armor and taking the bracers from the old black armor Keith had returned to the armory. Newer, reinforced arm pieces were being worked on but would take at least a day.

He looked left and right, starting to fidget from the suspense of nothing happening, rotating his shoulders and trying not to get too tense.

The new arm was mostly organic, aside from the white color and the delicate vein of silver running down it there was no difference in how both arms moved, felt, and functioned. But Allura had said the new one was based on Honerva’s original design, and now they needed to test it to see how well it worked.

Shiro heard the soft sound of the ceiling door opening up and spun to face the Gladiator drone as it dropped down into the room and charged at him. He had fought it before, often enough to be able to tell that it was currently on a low difficulty setting to help him get started.

Knowing Allura, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

He ran forward and met the drone head on, bringing his arm around instinctively in the familiar cutting motion he had grown accustomed to as a Paladin. There was no conscious effort on his part, just the naturally honed reaction that left the drone stumbling backward before falling down with sparks shooting out of the deep slice across its middle.

Shiro pulled the glove from his hand, showing the blue glow that was so different from the purple his original prosthetic had given off. He could hear Veronica and Pidge cheering over the open radio from where they sat up in the control room and couldn’t help the slight grin that graced his own face. This was honestly some amazing work.

“Okay, raising the difficulty,” Allura told him predictably, as the destroyed drone dropped through the floor. “Going to jump up five levels.”

“Jeez, at least take me out for a drink before you screw me,” Shiro muttered, ducking as another drone dropped down behind him and came out swinging.

He rolled across the floor to avoid having his head lopped off by its sword, instinctively getting to his feet and darting away to put space between him and his attacker. He didn’t have any extra weapons, this was solely to test out what he had, but the drone had both a sword and a shield. Which was no matter, Shiro had taken down much better defended enemies before.

He decided to use offense as his defense, only taking a second or two to size up what he was up against before closing the distance and going on the attack. The drone brought up its energy shield to block his punch, but as his quintessence-infused fist hit its surface it rippled, overloading and flickering out of existence. Shiro took a swipe as he had at the first drone but missed, then moved in to take another. He put the machine on the defensive, making it back away and block with its sword, unable to make an attack.

It was very physical, more strenuous fighting than he had done in a while. For the first time since surrendering the Black Lion he started to feel alive, like he still had fight left in him and wasn’t becoming a semi-useless desk jockey like half of the senior officers at the base.

“Going up five more levels!” Allura announced.

“Wait, what?” Shiro sputtered, pulling back halfway through a swing as the lights on the drone flickered and it started moving faster. “Hold on, what happened to the warm up?”

He was forced to duck as the drone got the chance to start attacking. Now he was on defensive, dodging and rolling and doing his best to block. The confidence boost he’d gotten only a few minutes ago quickly started to wane in the face of the challenge as he was forced to start giving ground.

“Up five more!”

“ _Allura_!” Shiro exclaimed, unable to do anything but block the blows of the sword and try to keep his feet.

He failed. The sword came down in an arc and he ducked it, but the drone’s reflexes were better than a human’s and it was easily able to stop its momentum and reverse. The flat side of the sword slammed into Shiro’s legs, sweeping them out from under him before the weapon was lunged straight down at him. Shiro rolled over on his back and caught the blade with both hands, wrapping the reinforced one’s fingers around it to protect his weaker hand from being cut.

He didn’t have much leverage, but the new arm was strong. He was able to force the sword backward, slamming it up into the drone’s head and making it stumble back.

“Allura?” Shiro called desperately, scrambling to his feet and getting out of the way just as the blade came down again to slam into the floor. “I think we need to take it down a notch or two. Preferably ten. Allura!”

“I believe in you, Shiro!” Allura called encouragingly.

“That doesn’t help!”

He was now at the point where he was pulling out all the stops. The sword came whirling around toward his middle, forcing him to cartwheel forward and over it as it passed, landing in a crouch. He backflipped himself up, slamming the drone’s face with a kick and landing in a handstand that trailed into a backward roll away and up to his feet. Another one-handed cartwheel over the sword as it came around again, a jumping roundhouse kick that landed a blow on the side of the Gladiator’s head and made it stumble backward.

He was really breathing heavy now, starting to sweat from the exertion, heart pounding.

“Three more levels!”

“Three more—how many damn levels does this thing _have_?” Shiro panted, ducking a blow that very nearly took off his head.

The next swing came so close Shiro felt the sword blade skim the side of his face. He tried to back up to put some distance between them, but the drone dropped down and lashed out with a foot, sweeping his legs out from under him again. It moved fast, so fast Shiro could only roll out of the way to avoid taking the blade tip in the face, and he felt it come so close it scraped his collar.

He shoved himself up off the floor and started to get up, but the hilt of the sword slammed down between his shoulders and dropped him down to his knees. The drone spun, bringing the sword whipping around at the perfect height to take off Shiro’s head. He saw it coming and knew he couldn’t move or block, and for a moment his mind went completely blank in panic.

He threw up his arms in a last, desperate effort to only end up maimed instead of dead, and saw the crystal in his hand flash just before he felt the pressure of impact. Like the black bayard he’d once used he felt the cool rush of quintessence run over his hand and solidify into something he could hold, instinctively closing his fingers around the grip of the newly formed weapon and using it in defense.

It was a curved, double-sided blade with the grip in the middle, not very long but perfect for slashing and grabbing. It had two curved edges that curled back both to protect his fingers and to provide openings in which an attacking sword could get stuck.

Shiro saw the edge of the drone’s sword blade slide into one of the curved slots and reacted quickly, twisting his own blade and spinning the sword in the drone’s hand. The movement loosened its grip and let him wrench the sword out of its hand entirely. He tossed it across the floor and moved in with a flurry of slashing blows, taking the drone down piece by piece. The reinforced blade sliced through the metal like it was paper, leaving him panting heavily over a smoldering, sparking mess within a few moments.

“Time out,” he choked out, making a “T” shape with his blade and other hand. “I’m too old for this.”

There was no answer from the control room, but a second later the door opened and the three girls came tumbling out, Pidge jumping up to hang off his neck in a hug.

“That was so awesome!” She exclaimed. “I wish you could’ve seen it from our view!”

“How did you _flip_ like that?” Veronica gushed. “I didn’t expect you to be able to do any of that!”

“Okay, I didn’t actually mean that I was too old,” Shiro said defensively. “We all know how to do that. Even your brother can do those moves.”

“Lance?” Veronica asked, laughing slightly at the thought. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

It was a good-natured, faux disbelief. Anyone who hadn’t been on the sixth floor of the Atlas had seen the video feeds, they’d seen Lance take Shiro down with nothing but a knife and some acrobatics. They were just all trying to pretend it hadn’t happened.

“What is this?” Shiro asked Allura as she joined them, instead of commenting. He eased Pidge down to the floor with his free hand while holding up the blade, which shimmered and seemed to liquefy before spilling over his fingers and disappearing back into the crystal. “It feels like a bayard.”

“It is,” Allura answered, practically beaming with pride as she lifted his hand and pointed to the thin veins of silver. “Well, it’s as close to one as I could get. This is from a spool of wire I took from the Castle of Lions before it was destroyed, it’s made from some of the trans-reality comet ore. All of the leftover ore itself was taken when the ships were, but some of the spare parts were left behind and I took what I could.”

She let go of his hand and he stepped back, flicking it to test. The blade flared into existence again, and he flipped it from hand to hand and took a few practice swings. Like the bayard he’d used before, it was perfectly weighted and perfectly suited to the way he preferred to fight.

“Okay, I have to agree with Pidge, this is awesome. And it will just always be there?”

“As long as your arm is,” Allura answered. “The crystal acts as quantum storage and the ore powers everything, just like with the Lions and the original bayards. Because it has so much quintessence running through it, you may even be able to activate some Altean technology the way your old arm could activate Galra, but that’s something we’ll have to test and see.”

Shiro flicked his fingers and the blade blinked back out of sight. It was the first time he’d ever seen a weapon like it, but it felt like a natural extension of his fist. Light, strong, maneuverable, able to both attack and defend. When he’d first used the black bayard it had taken the form of a sword, but it seemed that as time went on and he continued to develop his up-close-and-personal fighting style the weapon most suited to him had changed.

“Princess?” Coran’s voice came over the paging system. “Keith is calling in, requesting a wormhole back to Earth.”

The group all looked at each other, but nobody dared say out loud what they were all thinking. Coran wouldn’t have hesitated to announce that Lance was with Keith if that were the case, but he hadn’t.

“Excuse me,” Allura said diplomatically. “The sooner I get up there, the sooner he can debrief us.”

“We’ll wait in my office,” Shiro nodded as she left before turning to the others. He gave Veronica what he hoped was an encouraging smile, and activated the comm in his helmet. “Let’s go see what he has to say. Hunk, can you come up to my office please? Keith will be back soon.”

“Copy that, Shiro.”

Shiro let the girls go ahead of him, following them to the elevators. Emotionally he was a mess…worried about Keith, petrified for Lance, devastated over the clues pertaining to Adam. Physically he felt good, better than he had in a long time now that he’d had a chance to move around. He was a physical person, he was used to setting his problems aside and ignoring them in favor of rigorous activity. He wished he could still do that more often.

He unlocked his office and they filtered in, Pidge stopping to look at the giant slice that was still in the door.

“Is this from Keith’s bayard?”

“Yeah,” Shiro glanced over at it. “That was when he called Zarkon’s sword. I’m still a little worried about him, but he’s calmed down a lot since he was able to start actively doing something to find Lance. We just have to keep an eye on him when things are quiet.”

“Hey!” Hunk appeared in the doorway, holding a cardboard storage box. “Is he here yet?”

“No, not yet,” Veronica moved out of his way so he could take the box over to the desk. “Allura only just went to go jump him back. And no, no word yet on Lance.”

“Oh.” Hunk deflated a bit. “Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad happened, right? I mean, worse than what’s already gone down.”

Shiro didn’t really want to answer that. The fact that Keith hadn’t called in to them could mean that something terrible had happened that he wanted to share face-to-face, or it could mean nothing worthwhile enough to talk about over the comms had happened. All they could do was wait.

“What’s in the box?” Veronica asked curiously, leaning over to peek inside. Hunk gave her an apologetic look as he moved it to the side so she couldn’t see.

“I had some time while I was waiting for the parts I need to arrive, so I decided to do some research into our missing Paladin,” he answered, bringing the box over to the table. “Professor Wolfe was living on base when he went missing, and since Veronica said his family hadn’t been contacted I went to check the storage warehouse to see if we still had his things. Turns out they emptied his barracks quarters but had nobody to claim any of it.”

He set the box in front of Shiro, looking a bit awkward.

“I took a hair brush for a DNA sample. I, uh, didn’t want to go digging through his stuff in case there was anything personal, I figured you might want to. There’s a couple other boxes down in storage, too.”

Shiro looked at the box on his desk uncomfortably. He knew for a fact Adam’s family wasn’t going to claim his things because his contact listed in the Garrison records was his grandfather, and he had passed away the year before the Kerberos mission. He also knew that he, personally, had no right to go through any of this other than what his rank might give him. The last time they had seen each other, he and Adam were officially not together anymore.

But knowing that and respecting it were two different things. Feeling guilty even as he did it, Shiro pushed a flap from the box open to look at the contents. It looked like a mix of things from Adam’s office, his flight locker, and smaller things from his room.

The biggest item was the framed degree, the Doctorate in Astronautical Engineering had been awarded only two months before the Galra attack. It hit Shiro then that as both a pilot and an engineer, Adam had likely played some role in building the MFEs; after his accident he had preferred academic pursuits to flying when he was able.

Not that it had done him much good in the end, when Sanda had ordered woefully unprepared pilots out to their deaths.

A lot of what was in the box was familiar. The blue, owl-shaped mug Shiro had bought him one Christmas, a small jar with blue sand and tiny shells that was a souvenir from Bermuda, a little black maneki neko statuette. A small locker mirror, the brush Hunk had taken a sample from, keys, wallet. Shiro absently picked up a velvet ring box and flipped it open, closing it immediately.

Adam’s proposal years ago had come while they were walking in the park. It had seemed almost offhand, that casualness Adam often used to gauge reactions before deciding whether to let his honest thoughts be known. Shiro had never even known there was an actual ring involved, he had shut it down before it got that far.

He shoved the ring box down into the corner of the box, under some of the other items there before any of the Paladins could see. As he did so he found Adam’s phone, trying to turn it on just out of curiosity, but the battery was dead.

It was absolutely one of the worst invasions of privacy that could ever be committed, but Shiro would freely admit he had never been an angel. He closed up the box and pulled his own charger out of his drawer, plugging the phone in as he sat down and looked to Hunk.

“Did you find anything?” He asked curiously.

“Only one vague hit in the Olkari’s genetics databases,” Hunk admitted. “Old history records say Nalquod had two sister species on it, but Blaytz’s kind were killed off completely when the planet was destroyed.

“The other were called Nixa, a few pods that migrated off-planet before the Galra attacked have been recorded here and there, but they’re considered extinct now. There’s nothing written about them anywhere, they seem more like animals than a civilization. But, the Olkari did point me in the direction of the last known recorded pod, and we’re lucky enough to have friends there.”

He sat down at the end of the desk and opened his laptop, putting in a call and projecting it up on Shiro’s monitor. A few moments later it was answered by a pretty woman with big, dark eyes and delicate, flower-like neck fins that floated lightly in some kind of faint current swirling around her.

“Hello, Hunk,” her lips moved to form the words, but the sounds that came through the speaker were mechanically generated. That was when Shiro realized she was under water. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Same,” Hunk grinned. “Did you get my message earlier?”

“Yes, and I did find some research you might be able to use.”

“Awesome. Plaxum, this is Shiro, Veronica, and Pidge. Guys, this is Plaxum, she’s one of Queen Luxia’s advisers.”

“Nice to meet you,” Shiro said politely, doing his best not to be distracted by the fact that she had a fish tail.

He had, of course, been forced to sit through Lance’s excited talk of mermaids, but he’d always been more concerned about the creature Lance and Hunk had dealt with than the locals. Seeing an actual mermaid himself was an entirely different story.

“You as well,” Plaxum said pleasantly. “Queen Luxia sends her regards, and her regrets that all she’s able to contribute to your cause at this time is information.”

“Information is more than enough,” Shiro assured her. “Hunk tells us your people know about something called the Nixa.”

“Yes, a pod of them took up unwelcome residence on our planet years ago. They’re semi-aquatic but lived on the surface, hunting travelers who visited.”

“Hunting?” Pidge repeated. “What do you mean hunting?”

“The Nixa are carnivores and predators…other humanoid species are their prey,” Plaxum explained. “They are beautiful as a bait ploy, and use their voices to charm targets and lure them to their deaths. They weren’t a terrible problem for us, until the Baku came…once the vents were covered and the surface became icy, visitors became rare and their food supply scarce. They began hunting us instead.”

“But they’ve disappeared now?” Veronica asked.

“Yes. The planet got too cold, and they ultimately began to die out. Four corpses have been recorded in the waters, the rest either died on the surface or migrated again. Hunk tells me you have a DNA sample from a Nixi-human hybrid…this is interesting news. We don’t have much on them, only what little our own zoologists gathered, but the Nixa were highly aggressive and they hunted for sport as well as for food. It’s difficult to imagine them interbreeding with a species they would consider prey.”

“If you met the human mother you’d be less surprised,” Shiro said dryly. “She’s…not very nice.”

“Nice enough to cut down on the worst instincts, it sounds like,” Plaxum supposed. “If you only found out from a DNA test instead of behavior, then the hybrid is at least less dangerous than the parent.”

Unbidden, Shiro remembered Adam challenging a large, heavily-tattooed biker to a fight outside of a bar, screaming very explicit insults at him in Portuguese.

“Yeah,” he said weakly. “Less dangerous.”

Though, he supposed it could be worse. To his knowledge, at least Adam had never eaten anybody.

Plaxum ran her fingers over the holographic console in front of her. A graphic came up at the bottom of the viewscreen showing the file transfer taking place. As she was working the door opened and Keith entered with Allura, drawing all eyes expectantly. They were alone, Keith’s expression unreadable. Plaxum noticed Keith enter as well as everyone’s looks in his direction.

“It appears you have a meeting, and I should get back to work. It was lovely seeing you again, Hunk. Please, tell Lance to give me a call sometime.”

“Uh, I will do that,” Hunk promised quickly when Keith looked sharply at the screen. “Thanks, Plaxum!”

He ended the call, whirling to face Keith as soon as the viewscreen went dark.

“Did you find him?”

“I did.” Keith looked so unhappy when he said it that Shiro felt his heart skip a beat and initially feared the worst. Not that what Keith said next was really any better. “He wanted to let me help him, but in the end he decided he had to go back.”

“Go back?” Veronica surged to her feet, her worry turning to anger. “You had him and you let him go back? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“He wouldn’t leave Romelle behind, and there are kids on that outpost,” Shiro could hear Keith’s temper starting to flare in the changing tone of his voice, and rose from his desk to move between them. “And he may not have remembered clearly but I think he knew on some level he needed to go find Griffin. You remember James Griffin, right? Also went missing? Are we still worried about him or are we just pretending he doesn’t exist?”

“That’s _not_ fair,” Veronica defended.

“Welcome to war, nothing is _fair_ ,” Keith shot back.

“Lieutenants,” Shiro said warningly, raising his hands to keep them separated. “This isn’t the time to fight among ourselves. Instead we need to be figuring out how and when we’re going to go pick him up. We have the outpost coordinates thanks to Romelle, let’s put them to use. Keith, I’d like a full debriefing, if the rest of you could please excuse us.”

Veronica glared at them defiantly, and Shiro understood completely. She undoubtedly felt like she was being frozen out of something she deserved to be part of, but the truth was that Keith was less than tactful and he needed the whole story so he could decide how to present it to the others.

“Why don’t you come help me do an inventory of the armory?” Allura suggested softly, taking Veronica’s arm. Shiro pretended not to notice that Veronica was starting to sniffle as they left, promising himself he’d speak to her in private later.

“We’ll go help my dad, he’s finishing up fixing the controls for the engine room door today,” Pidge said awkwardly as she and Hunk made their escape.

When they were alone Shiro moved the box of Adam’s things to a shelf, sitting on the edge of his desk as Keith dropped heavily into one of the chairs across from him.

“You okay?” Shiro asked.

“No.” Keith closed his eyes, rubbing them with one hand. “I had him right there. I could’ve knocked him out and brought him back here, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now. But I let him make the decision and now I have to sit here and live with it.”

“Did he seem lucid?” Shiro pressed. “I mean, the last time you two saw each other…”

“I did what you said, I just talked,” Keith sighed, opening his eyes. “No fighting, no arguing. He was pretty calm. Scared, and his arms were a mess from trying to write notes on them. But it was just like talking to Lance, he was reasonable just like you thought he’d be. He’s trying to do the right thing, he just doesn’t have enough memory to know what it is.”

“And he went back to get Romelle?”

“Romelle, and some of the Alteans,” Keith answered, pushing himself up from his slouch to sit more comfortably. “Honerva’s scheduled to be gone for another day, he thinks he can get in and get some of the younger ones out before she comes back. I put a tracker on him, but he must’ve found it and turned it off.”

Keith leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees, resting his face in his hands. He didn’t seem capable of sitting in any one position for more than a few moments, jumpy and unable to be still.

“I made him promise to come back. I guess all there is to do is wait and see if he meant it. Wait and see if he even can come back.”

“Keith,” Shiro leaned forward to rest his hands on his little brother’s shoulders, rubbing them lightly in the way he’d seen Krolia absently do before. “Lance is a social disaster, but he’s a very capable soldier. Let’s be really honest here since we’re alone…he kicked both of our asses. Some of it was luck, but that’s any fight. If he thinks he can get in, get Romelle, and get out, then let’s have a little faith. He always had faith in you that you would come back when you went on Marmora missions, try to return the favor.”

“I know,” Keith groaned, lifting his head and letting it fall back so he was looking at the ceiling over Shiro’s head. “It’s just—“

He stopped, blinking as his gaze dropped down to Shiro’s. Slowly, he looked from left to right at the hands resting on his shoulders, going back and forth three times before his eyes traced the length of the new arm from wrist to shoulder. Gingerly, he reached up to poke at Shiro’s upper arm.

“Pretty awesome, huh?” Shiro asked, glad to shift topics even if it was only temporary. Too much emotion in too condensed of a time frame wasn’t really something Keith handled well. Shiro unclipped the armor pieces, setting them on his desk so he could roll up the sleeve of the under armor. “Allura did it. Look at this.”

He flicked his hand, summoning the bayard blade, and Keith’s mouth actually dropped open.

“When the hell did she become a full-fledged wizard?” He asked in amazement, surging up from his seat. He took the offered blade and turned it over, but like any of their bayards it seemed to sense it was in the wrong hands. It disappeared, swirling back into the crystal on Shiro’s hand in a flash of liquid light. “It looks real.”

Shiro offered his hand as if for a handshake, and Keith took it. His eyes went even wider.

“It _feels_ real.”

“Yeah, and look, I even have an elbow now,” Shiro pointed out. “So I can do this.”

He grabbed Keith in a headlock and treated him to a merciless noogie, making him flail and let out a series of muffled screeches that might have been threats on Shiro’s life. Keith might have been getting big but Shiro was still bigger, and Keith was ultimately at his mercy.

That wasn’t to say he wasn’t perfectly capable of fighting back though, and the two of them were sprawled on the floor mid-wrestle when they heard the roar.

It vibrated through the Atlas, impossible to ignore, and a moment later was followed by a violent shaking that reverberated through half the ship. An alarm started to sound, making the two surprised and confused men scramble to their feet to reach the intercom on the desk. Keith was faster, using Shiro as a step-stool to get up and accidentally kicking him back down to the floor in the process.

“Allura, what’s going on down there?” Keith demanded as the screen lit up with a view of the lion hangars. The image kept jumping, like the camera was being jostled, as he zoomed in to where Allura stood by the airlock.

“Red’s gone mad!” She exclaimed, pressing in her code quickly and flattening herself against the wall. She had Veronica there with her, both of them staring in shock back into the hangar, out of view of this camera. “I’m trying to open the airlock before she opens it herself and we have to do more repairs!”

“She’s on the move?” Shiro asked, looking from Allura to Keith.

“She’s trying to get to Lance,” Keith realized. “Allura! You’re coming with me, we’re going to follow her. Hunk! Pidge!”

“Here,” they chirped simultaneously over the comm, having joined in to find out what the noise was.

“Do whatever you need to do to get the Atlas airborne and battle ready within twenty-four hours,” Keith ordered. “And be ready to have Yellow and Green in the air at a moment’s notice. I don’t know what we’ll find and we need to be ready in case we bring a battle back with us. Are the jump crystals charged?”

“Five of them,” Allura answered. “If we need the Atlas to join us, it will be able to.”

“All right, let’s go. Shiro—”

“I’m coming with you,” Shiro cut him off, already putting the rest of his armor back on. He grabbed the phone off the desk and the adapter out of his desk drawer and glared at Keith and Allura, daring them to tell him no. They looked at each other, and shrugged.

“Okay,” Keith said.

“So am I!” Veronica piped up. “If you think you might find my little brother, then I’m coming!”

“Okay,” Keith repeated, not even bothering to put up any fight at this point. He was clearly in no mood to argue when he could be getting ready to go. “Load the spare armor up in Blue and grab a weapon, we’ll be right down. Veronica, you’re with Allura. Shiro will be with me.”

They left the office and headed down to the Lion hangars in a rush. When they got there, Veronica and Allura were loading the whole storage chest of spare armor and some weapons onto Blue. Keith followed them aboard, leaning into the storage bay as they sat the chest down.

“I need you guys to follow Red,” he told Allura. “We’ll catch up with you.”

“Where will you be going?”

“To check out the outpost,” Keith answered. “If that’s where she’s headed, Black can get there faster with his wings and help out if something’s wrong. But if he’s gone and she’s headed somewhere else, I need you on her tail.”

“Do you want me to open a wormhole for you to get you near the outpost?” Allura asked, following him as he left Blue.

“No time,” Keith shook his head, backing away. At the far end of the hangar, Black rose seemingly of his own accord and walked toward Keith and Shiro. “You’d have to run up to the bridge and then get back down here. Just follow Red and keep your comm lines open, something could come through from Romelle.”

Black didn’t stop, dipping his head down for Keith and Shiro to hop aboard along his way to the open airlock. He was already out and rising up into the air as they made their way to the cockpit, Keith dropping down in the pilot seat.

“It feels different in here,” Shiro noted, glancing around.

“Probably because you’re used to the bridge of the Atlas,” Keith answered. He glanced back at Shiro, smiling slightly. “Black says he missed you.”

Shiro chuckled softly, patting one of Black’s side consoles. He blinked in surprise when the ship made a noise that sounded almost like purring, and Keith laughed.

“They seem more alive as time goes by, don’t they?”

“Disturbingly so,” Shiro answered. He leaned against the back of Keith’s seat as they rose up out of Earth’s atmosphere. “How long will the trip to the outpost take us?”

“About an hour,” Keith answered. “Even at Black’s top speed. And it will be a bumpy ride once the bayard goes in, you might want to find a spot you can brace yourself in back in the cargo hold.”

“All right,” Shiro nodded. “Give me two minutes, then hit it.”

He left the cockpit and went to the hold, glancing around. It was mostly empty, anything they’d taken from the Castle of Lions had long since been unloaded. Nothing had harnesses, of course.

Shiro tore the pillow and blanket from where Keith had everything tucked tightly into the bed and propped open the door to one of the smaller, empty storage closets, dropping down to sit on the floor there. He put the pillow behind his back for what he knew was about to be a nasty bit of acceleration, and braced himself.

If he started to fly all over the place, at least the smaller space would stop him from being thrown all the way to the back of the Lion.

He counted down silently, tensing when he heard the growing whine of Black’s engines preparing to fire full force. Keith was right, it was a bumpy start as the Lion first sped up under engine power then put on a burst of fresh speed when its wings deployed. Shiro rode it out until he started to become accustomed to it and could breathe normally again.

An hour until they reached their destination, which honestly wasn’t bad since they were hopping galaxies. Shiro took out the adapter and set it on the floor, plugging his phone charger into it. Nothing in the Lions actually ran using a plug, the energy ran through he metal itself and Pidge and Hunk had put together wireless adapters. He took out the phone, still dark and powered down, and hesitated.

There was nothing on here that was his to see. Whether Adam was alive or not, messing with this phone was a serious breach of privacy and he knew it. Shiro plugged the phone in and powered it up anyway. Adam Wolfe was the _last_ person in the world to preach to him about respecting boundaries, even from beyond the grave.

The phone was password protected, but there were a few things he could try. RAVEN was the name of the stray cat he’d always fed and was very fond of, but that didn’t work. SOFIA was his sister’s name, he’d only known her for a few years but loved her anyway, but that didn’t work either. Neither did TIGER, the name of the neighbor’s dog he’d loved so much. Out of curiosity he tried SHIRO, which didn’t work either. Not that he really expected it to, Adam had never called him that.

Shiro sighed and paused, knowing he was going about this the wrong way. Adam was a “new year, new me” kind of person, he’d throw out everything after their breakup and start fresh, and that included things like passwords. One thing that would never change, however, was that Adam was a little princess. Shiro checked his own phone for the right numbers, then tried 77232.

PRADA. The phone unlocked.

“Of-freaking-course,” he muttered, immediately going to the one place where his snooping was the least forgivable: the text messages.

It was a nightmare there for many reasons, the main one being that Adam was a key smasher. Half of his replies were some variation of “fjklaslhelkas,” and he had apparently spent the year before the Galra attack spamming pictures of kittens in an ongoing group chat. Shiro wasn’t even really sure who any of the people he was talking to were, Adam didn’t have any actual names in here. It was just aliases like “Dumbass 1,” “Dumbass 2,” and “Mr Rogers Would Be Ashamed.”

Until he got to the archive of texts under the name “Fuckface” and found all of his own messages still saved in there. Shiro was not surprised at the label.

As much as he hated to admit it, he was looking for signs that Adam had moved on. Indications that if he was alive and Shiro could find him it would be somebody else he went home to. And it was Adam, so there were plenty of suggestive and even downright inappropriate messages, some planning dates and some exchanges of risque pictures. But there was nothing solid, no interactions that went on longer than a few days before tapering off.

Except that Lieutenant Commander Curtis Duchesne kept making fairly regular appearances in photos.

Curtis was the communications officer aboard the Atlas, a nice enough guy but Shiro didn’t know him quite as well as he knew some of the others. He sat to Shiro’s right, and since he usually used his right hand for his console he had a tendency to look left more often, toward Veronica and their one alien crew member Lieutenant Dane.

There was nothing explicit or even suggestive about the pictures, but they bothered Shiro. He showed up in a lot of them, usually selfies Adam had taken of the two of them crowding the frame. It was difficult to see the backgrounds, to tell if they were out on a date or just hanging out somewhere on the Garrison grounds.

Had they been dating? Maybe there was no text trail because Adam had deleted it. He would have done that, along with any more revealing pictures, if he was covering up the fact that he was sleeping with a superior officer. Adam had been a Captain right before Shiro had left for Kerberos, but although the Garrison was technically a single military force the ranks on ships like the Atlas ran differently. Before the ship was built and Curtis was reassigned he was a Major, and possibly someone Adam answered to directly.

All in all it wasn’t…a _bad_ choice, except for the blatant breach of ethics. Curtis was a decent guy as far as Shiro could tell, good-natured and smart. He had his life together, he hadn’t run off to go die in space, and he seemed like the kind of man who supported people as much as they supported him. He was also in line for promotion up to Commander soon, which was no small feat.

“Well, I’m a _Captain_ ,” Shiro muttered to the silent phone. “Still a higher ranking officer. And a galactic war hero. _I_ flew the Black Lion, and fought in a Galra arena, and went head to head with Zarkon. What’s Curtis got going for him? Oooh, he probably shops at Armani Exchange. Big deal.”

Shiro closed out the photo gallery before he irritated himself further. He had absolutely no right to be upset if Adam had moved on, he was just going to work himself up. He went into the music app instead, that was safe enough.

Adam’s tastes had not gotten any less adorably horrendous. Shiro put his songs on random and paged through, still not entirely sure even after years of knowing Adam how he listened to most of it. Gangster rap was followed by a cartoon opening theme song, followed by a power ballad, followed by alternative, followed by pop. It was pretty much the same as what he’d constantly been subjected to during their last year of school.

He went through playlists, starting at the top and feeling a pang of guilt over “Breakup,” which was a dozen depressingly sad songs that Shiro imagined Adam had probably played on repeat for hours while buried under the blankets of his bed. The exercise mix was mostly rap, and he had a curious playlist simply called “Tuesday” that had no discernible theme. He had a playlist for cooking, one for driving, and one labeled “Makes Me Happy.”

Shiro opened that one. He wasn’t surprised at all at the first song, it had always been Adam’s favorite and probably would be no matter how old it was. Shiro set it to play.

“ _Get out your guns, battle’s begun, are you a saint or a sinner? If love’s a fight, then I shall die, with my heart on the trigger…_

Shiro hadn’t heard this song in a very long time, not since the morning of the day Adam had given him the ultimatum. He had come back to their apartment from his morning jog, Adam had been in the kitchen making breakfast with his music playing quietly. It had been a happy morning, blissfully domestic, the kind of thing Shiro had run away from only to wishfully fantasize about it during the lonely moments out in space.

Shiro set the phone down and closed his eyes, listening to the memories play in the quiet of Black’s cargo hold.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years ago**_ :

The music was loud, the house was packed, and there was a lot of skin showing everywhere. Shiro wasn’t really regretting his decisions for the day, but this wasn’t necessarily at the top of his list of things that were a good time either.

Adam had turned eighteen today and wanted to celebrate, and he’d decided to do so by sneaking out and going to a house party at one of the fraternity houses in town. Shiro hadn’t actively been invited, but he had developed a habit of tagging along when Adam did something interesting as long as the other cadet didn’t expressly tell him no.

And he very rarely got a no. Adam always seemed annoyed by his presence, but even though he was the one who always drove he had yet to so much as tell Shiro he couldn’t always have shotgun, let alone tell him to get out of the car. In fact, Shiro was well aware he’d become a regular enough fixture that it was generally known among Adam’s friends that if he was going, he got the front seat.

He had arrived here that way about an hour ago, along with Adam, McKenna, Jolie, and Drew, but it had only been a matter of a few minutes before Jolie and Drew had wandered off and Adam had been claimed by a girl who was at least four years older than them. It was weird, and Shiro had trailed off elsewhere with McKenna so he didn’t have to watch.

It wasn’t long after that when two guys approached them, one of them targeting McKenna. Shiro got the feeling that most of the college kids here knew their group was underage but flocked to them in the hope that youth meant inexperience and naivete. He had kept his eye on McKenna, ready to step in if there was any trouble, but so far she had very artfully managed to enjoy herself with flirting while avoiding letting them get too pushy.

At some point, Shiro had gotten separated from McKenna without realizing it was happening. He found himself across the room, herded over to where a small handful of the college’s football players were hanging out in the corner, but not really able to extricate himself. He still had eyes on McKenna, she was with two of the guys’ friends over by the sofa, and knew he was being kept over here so that she would be left all alone.

But he didn’t want to make a scene, so he let the group keep him trapped in the conversation about the upcoming game between the Broncos and the Cowboys. While he talked he kept making sure McKenna was okay, occasionally sweeping the room for one of the others.

Eventually he spotted Adam, sitting halfway up the stairs to the second floor with the girl still chatting him up. He occasionally looked out into the room at both McKenna and Shiro, but didn’t bother to go and help her out even though he could see Shiro wasn’t able to. It was aggravating, especially since from what he’d seen so far he never would have thought Adam would be the kind of person who just left a friend in distress.

Shiro was having an even harder time keeping track of McKenna because Liam, the guy who he’d initially started talking to, was trying to subtly hit on him even though he was terrible at subtlety. How the older boy had known he was gay Shiro didn’t know, but he’d picked up on it and he was laying it on thick.

If Shiro was being honest, he was flattered by the attention. It was difficult having any kind of real romantic life at a military boarding school if you weren’t straight, it wasn’t often he had college guys hinting at him that he was attractive. Liam wasn’t all that terrible, either. He wasn’t one of the football players but his brother was one. He wasn’t actually into sports and he was studying computer programming. He was tall, a bit on the lanky side, with almost wolf-like blue eyes and light blond hair.

But even though it was nice to be noticed, Shiro kept his own flirting mild and noncommittal. There was a lot of drinking going on here and he didn’t want the lack of full sobriety to leave Liam thinking anything terribly serious was going to happen tonight.

“I’m getting a drink,” Liam announced after a while, holding up his empty beer bottle. “Come get one with me!”

Shiro was tempted—not to have a drink but to stick to Liam’s side—but the alcohol was in the kitchen. He wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on McKenna if he left the room, and Adam still hadn’t made any move to extricate her from her two paramours.

“I’ll just stay here and wait for you, if that’s okay,” he called over the music. “I don’t really drink anyway.”

“Okay…I’ll be right back,” Liam promised, running a hand over Shiro’s back in a way that almost made him blush.

He left the group and headed for the kitchen, with one of the other boys along as company instead. Shiro found himself pulled back into the conversation about next year’s Super Bowl, and whether the Broncos had a chance. He personally didn’t care and he said so, but that was because they weren’t his home team. His parents had immigrated from Japan to Seattle before he was born, he had grown up there before coming to the Garrison and he was a Seahawks fan.

It turned into a minor argument over who was the better team. When he remembered McKenna and finally looked over at her again he was relieved to see that Drew and Jolie had found her. She looked alarmed and he wondered what he’d missed, but a glance over at the stairs revealed that Adam had left his perch at some point and hadn’t been present to help her with whatever it was. Some friend.

Shiro felt guilty as well. He tried to excuse himself, but Liam and the other boy reappeared with bottles in their arms and started passing them around.

“And one for you,” Liam declared, pushing a bottle into Shiro’s hands. “I know you said you don’t really drink, so I just grabbed you a light beer. Really, it’s practically the same as water.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Shiro said awkwardly.

He wasn’t particularly a light beer fan, he’d only said he didn’t drink because he’d been trying to watch McKenna. Honestly, he’d rather have a real, _non_ -American beer or shots of actual liquor if he was going to be drinking. But now that the others were with McKenna he could eventually wander to the kitchen and see if there was anything decent.

He didn’t want to be a jerk though, so he accepted the bottle. It would be easy enough to throw it back and then move on to something else, but just as he was raising it to his lips he felt a heavy weight on his shoulder and looked over to find Adam leaning on him.

“We’re leaving,” Adam announced bluntly. “If you want shotgun you better get your ass in the car now, or Drew is gonna take it.”

“It’s barely nine o’clock,” Shiro answered, glancing at his watch. “Why are we leaving? Did something happen?”

“No, I just want to leave,” Adam said. He looked around at the group of football players, then looked Liam over from top to bottom. The face he made said he wasn’t impressed with any of them. “Gonna grab Chinese or something on the way home, let’s go.”

“I can give you a ride back if you want to stay,” Liam offered.

“He doesn’t want to stay,” Adam interjected.

“Wow, I can answer for myself, calm down,” Shiro snorted. He raised the bottle back to his lips but Adam pushed it back down.

“You’re the designated driver, you can’t stay.”

“No, you decided _you_ were the designated driver,” Shiro reminded him irritably. “Because nobody is allowed to drive your baby but you, remember?”

“Dude, if he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to go,” one of Liam’s friends finally spoke up, starting to get annoyed with Adam’s attitude. “Nobody invited you over here, screw off before I have to make you.”

“Funny thing about that, nobody asked you,” Adam replied, glancing over at him. “Don’t come for me, asshole. I don’t take ‘no’ very well.”

The football player pushed away from the wall and stepped forward, stopping in front of Adam in a way that was intended to be mildly threatening. He was a good two inches taller and clearly bigger, and to be honest Shiro found it somewhat satisfying to see Adam finally come up against someone who might potentially be his match. He was always being a dick and picking fights, but this guy looked like he was willing to take up the offer.

The other players chuckled and straightened up as well, prepared to help their friend remove Adam from the house. Adam looked over to Shiro, who just raised his hands in a sign that he wasn’t getting involved. Liam shrugged as well, leaning against the wall next to Shiro and crossing his arms, waiting to see what Adam would do now that he had a handful of college guys ready and able to pick him up and walk him out if necessary.

Shiro certainly wasn’t going to actually let anything bad happen, but it was still entertaining to watch. Adam was sizing them all up, and to be honest Shiro didn’t know if he really would try to fight them all or not. Adam didn’t necessarily win every fight he started, but it didn’t stop him from starting them in the first place. He had no idea what had his roommate so riled up now, but if it had to do with McKenna then it certainly wasn’t Shiro’s fault. He had been stuck over here unable to excuse himself while Adam had ignored her.

Adam looked at them all, and Shiro could practically see the calculus-level equations running through his head as he tried to decide how many of them he could take down before he went down himself. At length he came to the conclusion that throwing a punch just wasn’t wise in this situation.

“Okay,” he shrugged slightly, sighing. “I didn’t want to do this the hard way, but I guess we will.”

He reached over and took the beer from Shiro’s hand before anyone could react, and started to down it. Shiro had seen him do Car Bombs before, he wasn’t very surprised at how fast he finished it. When the bottle was empty Adam held it up above his head then released it, letting it fall down to break on the hard wood floor.

“Excuse me, I have to go to the ER for a blood test now,” he said blithely to Liam, pulling the car keys out of his pocket and slamming them hard into Shiro’s chest. “You might want to shut down your party before the cops show up. And you. Designated driver. _Now_.”

He grabbed Shiro’s arm and yanked him away from the wall, planting a hand between his shoulders and giving him a shove that propelled him forward. Shiro had never seen him so angry, and that included the years when they regularly got into fights. He finally got the clue that something was very wrong and did as he was told, glancing back at the group of football players as he headed outside. They looked like they were starting to panic.

“Finally!” Jolie exclaimed as they crossed the fraternity lawn and approached the car where the others waited. “What took you so long?”

“Nothing,” Adam snapped.

He threw himself into the passenger seat before anybody could say anything else. The others all looked at each other, then Drew turned to Shiro.

“Everything okay?” He asked. He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Yeah, everything is fine. As far as I know,” Shiro answered with a frown. He had no idea what that last exchange was about, but he figured he’d find out once he and Adam were back in their room and he could hound him for answers.

It was a good thing Shiro drove. He hadn’t had anything to drink, but with as giggly as the others were getting in the back seat on the way back to the Garrison there was no way they hadn’t had a few drinks. Adam was the only one who was quiet, looking out the passenger window with his arms crossed the whole ride back.

They parked the Audi in the factory parking lot outside of the Garrison, next to Adam’s motorcycle. Adam kept it here so they could sneak off the property on foot and then get in the car outside of the fence, making it easier to get out without being caught. Shiro turned the car off and turned to look in the back.

“Okay, the girls should go in first,” he suggested. “Their dorm is closer.”

It was smarter to sneak in and out in groups, harder to get caught. The girls giggled some more but managed to hush themselves, getting out of the car and scampering toward the Garrison where they would sneak in at the section of fence near the back that was broken and never noticed by staff to be repaired.

While they waited, the boys got out of the car. Shiro was out first, on his way around to hand over the keys, when Drew climbed out of the back. Adam was last, standing up and suddenly getting a strange look on his face.

“Oh, there it is,” he mumbled, dropping to the ground as if his legs had stopped working.

“Oh no,” Drew groaned as he and Shiro each grabbed an arm and helped Adam to his feet, holding him steady. “I knew you were too quiet. What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you _do_?” Drew insisted.

“ _Nothing_ ,” Adam said sharply. He pushed away from the two of them and did his best to stand under his own power, leaning against the car with one hand. “Just go. We’ll follow in a minute.”

Drew threw up his hands in exasperation, but knew better than to try. He did as he was told, disappearing into the night to make his way back to his own dorm room. Adam folded his arms on the roof of the car and rested his head on them, and Shiro regarded him warily.

“So what did you do that you don’t want them to know about?” He asked after a few moments of quiet. “Take some kind of drugs?”

Adam let out a bark of laughter into his arms. He raised his head tiredly, letting it fall all the way back.

“Yeah. I drank the friggin’ roofie your dense-as-a-brick ass was going to stay behind alone and suck down,” Adam pushed away from the car and swayed a little, but otherwise kept his feet. “I have maybe half an hour left before this really hits, we need to get back to the dorms.”

“Hold on, there was something in that beer and you drank it?” Shiro followed close behind, ready to grab Adam if he started to fall again. “Why didn’t you just say something, you psycho?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Adam’s voice was mocking and he rolled his eyes, still capable of being a jerk apparently. “Six college football players were going to kick my ass for getting involved no matter what I did. Sometimes distracting people by doing something crazy and walking away is the only chance to _get_ away.”

To say Shiro felt stupid was an understatement. He had been so focused on McKenna and on something happening to her that he hadn’t thought about himself. He was five-foot-ten and nearly two hundred pounds of junior military training, he ran on the assumption that things like that didn’t happen to people like him. At absolutely no time had he felt threatened, or that he was in any danger whatsoever, even though he’d noticed that they’d purposely separated him from the person he was with. And he had stupidly been willing to drink from an open container he had been handed.

It was literally everything they taught students to look out for in the yearly sexual assault assemblies. The assemblies Shiro liked to doze through, because they weren’t aimed at _him_.

It was also extremely embarrassing to realize that the reason Adam hadn’t moved from the stairs to help McKenna was because McKenna was paying attention to her surroundings. Enough to flag down Drew and Jolie when she was no longer comfortable, even. Adam had been keeping an eye on Shiro instead.

Sneaking in and out had become fairly routine since he’d become Adam’s roommate, they made it back into the safe zone without getting caught and were able to simply walk into the dorms since they were seniors and didn’t have a set time to be in their rooms. And it was a good thing they didn’t have to sneak at that point, because Adam was incapable.

Halfway to the dorms he’d become unable to walk under his own power and Shiro had started to help him. As they reached the entrance doors Adam basically slid out of Shiro’s hold and down to his knees because he was laughing too hard to stand. At length Shiro was able to get out of him that what was so funny was that “bumfuzzle is a real word.”

Shiro gave up on trying to be quiet at that point. He picked Adam up in a fireman’s carry and went for speed over stealth, thanking every god he could think of when he reached their room without running into any of the staff.

Adam was finally quiet as Shiro brought him in and closed the door behind them, hanging limply in the other boy’s hold.

“Still with me?” Shiro asked, giving him a shake before he put him down. It seemed to wake Adam up enough that he remembered to work his legs so he didn’t fall again.

“It’s hot in here,” he complained.

“So put on your pajamas,” Shiro told him. “I’m going to get you some water. Do not leave this room, understand?”

Adam swayed on his feet, making an X over his chest with one finger in a ‘cross my heart’ motion. Shiro really hated to leave him at all like this, but he was going to need to drink something. He dug the three different sports bottles and some washcloths out of his closet and headed to the boy’s locker rooms. He filled up the bottles with cold water and dampened the cloths, trying to move as quickly as he could without drawing the attention of the occasional other student coming and going. It was barely ten o’clock at this point, there were guys grabbing showers before bed after late nights of studying.

He expected Adam to be face-down in his bed when he returned, but that wasn’t the case. The room was still dark except for the desk lamp Shiro had turned on when they’d first come in, and the other cadet had managed to get out of his clothes and into shorts and a t-shirt without killing himself. Now he had music playing on his phone and he was singing along to it.

“Hey,” Shiro tried to interrupt, setting the water bottles down. He brought over one of the damp clothes and was glad he’d grabbed them, Adam was starting to get flushed. “Here. Come on, you need to lay down.”

“ _They say before you start a war, you better know what you’re fighting for_ ,” Adam continued to sing contentedly with his music, ignoring the entreaties. When Shiro came close he pulled the cloth out of his hand and draped it absently on his shoulder, taking both of his hands and pulling him into motion. “ _Well baby you are all that I adore, if love is what you need, a soldier I will be…_ ”

Adam didn’t sing. There were opportunities here and there, but it wasn’t something he did. He usually either outright refused or pretended it hadn’t been requested, but at the moment Shiro didn’t understand why. He really did have a beautiful voice when he was feeling uninhibited, and he was certainly feeling that way right now.

The whole picture was very different from the usual Adam. He was very…fluffy, for lack of a better word. Happy and light and expressive. And he apparently wanted to dance, something else he clearly knew how to do. Shiro’s only salvation on that front was having learned how to do a basic tango from a guest speaker at his school back in fifth grade.

“ _I’m an angel with a shotgun, fighting til the war’s won, I don’t care if heaven will take me back_ ,” Adam was really into the song, not that the lyrics meant anything to Shiro. He might have heard him playing it once or twice before but he didn’t really know it. “ _I’ll through away my faith, babe, just to keep you safe, don’t you know you’re everything I have…_ ”

Adam pulled away a little to spin out under their arms, before twirling back in against him. Shiro let him, wrapping both arms back around him when he was close again to make sure he stayed upright.

That was his excuse, anyway. Shiro was wondering if he hadn’t somehow come into contact with a small amount of whatever was put in his drink somehow, because he was starting to feel very dreamy and clouded. He didn’t feel like he was losing control or anything, but he did feel inexplicably like he was leaning more into what Adam wanted than his own will. He wasn’t particularly interested in dancing in the middle of their room when he should be putting his intoxicated bunk mate to bed, but that was what he was doing.

The song ended but nothing else started, the room simply fell quiet. Adam was completely out of it, acting like he was borderline blackout drunk. He draped his arms around Shiro’s neck to keep himself standing.

“You have very pretty eyes,” Adam slurred happily. “So pretty. You’re just pretty, just…all of you is pretty.”

Shiro was going to tell Adam that he was also pretty, since he probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning, but he was rendered unable to say anything by the kiss that followed.

It was not a shy or hesitant kiss in the least. It was firm and insistent, the kind of kiss Shiro sometimes found himself fantasizing about when he knew Adam wasn’t looking. The kind of kiss he never expected to actually occur, because the two of them weren’t exactly that compatible. It was the kind of kiss based solely on the idea that the other person was hot, not on affection.

Almost as surprising as the kiss was that Shiro found he didn’t care what kind it was. He was more than willing to return it, to respond to the hands that slid up under his shirt by breaking away just long enough to pull it off and toss it on the floor. Everything was a blur, the next thing he knew he was pushing Adam back onto his bed and climbing after him.

There was a part of his brain that was telling him he didn’t really want to do this. He knew he didn’t, Adam was under the influence of a drug and it was unbelievably wrong to take advantage. Shiro wanted to stop, he wanted to ignore the way Adam arched up against him and the way one hand tangled in his hair and the way one leg wrapped around his. But instead he only pulled away enough to kiss his way along Adam’s jaw, down to suck hard at the skin of his neck down near the junction with his shoulder.

He wasn’t sure how long he was at it, but after a few heartbeats the pleased sounds Adam was making became ones of obvious distress. He started to push Shiro off of him, and that finally broke the weird spell.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Shiro sputtered, pushing himself up off the other boy. “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m so fucking sorry, Jesus Christ!”

Adam sat up, all traces of blissful happiness gone. His eyes were damp and he looked devastated, and Shiro slid off the bed to grab one of the water bottles for lack of any other move to make. He brought it over, nervously offering it, and Adam stared at it like he’d never seen a water bottle before. After a moment he looked up at Shiro, looking uncharacteristically innocent and broken.

“I just remembered I watched _Benji: The Hunted_ yesterday _,_ ” he whispered, eyes still glazed over. “They killed the mother cougar. I didn’t want her to eat the dog, but they didn’t have to _kill_ her.”

Adam covered his face with both hands and started to full-on cry.

Shiro wasn’t sure what to do. On one hand, he was relieved that his indiscretion wasn’t what set the other boy off. On the other, he was crying over a movie. Not just sniffling either, his whole body was shaking and he sounded like he was at a funeral for his whole family. The effects of whatever had been in that drink were quickly going from funny to scary.

“It’s okay,” Shiro said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed. He started to rub Adam’s back in what he hoped was a reassuring way, only to have him drop his hands away from his face and throw his arms around Shiro’s neck.

“She was just trying to be a good mom, but they killed her,” Adam sobbed against Shiro’s shoulder. “She had four babies and they lost their mom, it’s not fair! Good moms always die and it’s not fucking _fair_!”

Shiro had no idea what had put this in motion, but whatever it was had set Adam completely off. He was hysterical mess, words were coming out but they were so distorted by shuddering breaths it was impossible to know what he was saying. It went on for almost five minutes, a lifetime of suppressed emotion pouring out as the dam finally burst, and Shiro was starting to worry he might have to take Adam to the infirmary if it continued for too long.

Eventually, he simply ran out of energy. Shiro felt the moment when Adam went limp, mentally and physically exhausted. His arms were still around Shiro’s neck, his head resting against his shoulder, the only thing keeping him from falling over.

“I’m sorry,” Adam whispered.

“It’s okay,” Shiro assured him awkwardly. “I’m not wearing a shirt for you to get wet.”

“No. I’m sorry your mom is sick.”

_Oh._

Shiro had never been secretive about his mother’s illness. There were days when he sometimes had to miss class on a Friday because he was going back to Seattle for a long weekend for one of her treatments, and he had a pass to always have his cell phone on in case he got a call from her nurse. She was getting worse, probably wouldn’t live for another year, and he wasn’t secretive about that either.

There was nothing really to say in response to Adam’s words. It was an unexpectedly touching thing to hear from somebody who came off as sweet to most people but generally didn’t seem to care about anyone. Shiro hugged him tighter, smoothing back his hair.

Adam only had a few more minutes in him before he passed out. That was the scariest part by far, when he suddenly went completely limp and almost seemed to not be breathing. Shiro panicked at that point, grabbing his laptop to look up the effects of different drugs that could have been in the drink. They all pointed to sudden loss of consciousness.

He knew the best course of action would be to go get an adult, but he was sure Adam would never forgive him if he did. Instead he carefully tucked the other boy into his bed, and sat on the floor by his bedside to doze.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

Remembering that evening, Shiro could believe what Plaxum said about the Nixa. That was the only time he could recall ever being unable to tell Adam no, and it had likely been because the other cadet was being emotional and uncontrolled. Adam had always been a charmer, almost always got what he wanted, but it didn’t always work on absolutely everyone and Shiro had been one of the people lucky enough to not easily fall victim.

Shiro hadn’t messed around with underage drinking after that night. He waited until he was old enough to go to a bar and be served a drink he saw being prepared, unwilling to risk the effects of something being slipped to him. What Adam had gone through had been frightening to watch, and the next day he had remembered none of it. Shiro hadn’t had the heart to tell him, either, he just told everyone Adam had fallen asleep as soon as he was back at the dorms.

He felt Black starting to decelerate and opened his eyes, quickly turning off and stowing the phone. He spun himself around to lean against the opposite wall, keeping himself from being thrown against it as the Black Lion slowed.

When they reached a normal cruising speed, one where he was able to get up and walk around without being tossed by the ship’s momentum, he returned the pillow and blanket to the bed and made his way to the cockpit.

“Are we there yet?” He asked, coming to lean against the chair from behind.

“Yeah,” Keith answered, expanding the overlays he was looking at so Shiro could see them as well. “It’s orbiting this planet, according to the coordinates it should be right on the other side. My scans aren’t picking up any signs of a battle, seems like things have calmed down. Cross your fingers we don’t end up in a fight.”

Keith brought Black in close to the planet’s upper atmosphere, skimming along to try and stay hidden as long as possible. Shiro scanned the horizon as they came around the night side of the planet, looking for signs of the Fire of Purification base that should be up ahead. There were no signs of life, no ships coming or going, and that in and of itself was strange. But as they moved across the twilight zone and over the planet’s day side to where their destination was located, the reason for the silence became clear.

There was nothing left of the outpost except a floating graveyard of scrap.


	9. Chapter 9

“When are you leaving?”

The question came along with a swing of First Lieutenant Duchesne’s bo staff, a swing Adam only barely managed to duck and almost ended up taking to the face.

“Jesus, are you trying to take my eye out?” Adam asked, backing away as Curtis stopped swinging and lightly twirled the staff instead.

“You’re distracted, that’s not my fault,” he defended. “Want to stop for today?”

“Not yet,” Adam declined, falling back into stance and bringing his own staff up, beginning to circle. “I need the practice. And my plane leaves at ten tomorrow morning.”

He came in for a strike, but it was blocked. Curtis drew his staff back and arced it down, sweeping Adam’s feet out from under him and dropping him to the mat in a flustered, frustrated mess.

“So you’re taking a long weekend to fly to Seattle, unannounced and uninvited, to attend a funeral for some guy’s mother, even though you never actually met her and you’re not even technically friends with him,” Curtis summarized, laying off long enough for Adam to get back up. “Sounds a little bit gay.”

“Don’t say that, every time you say that about somebody it turns out to be true,” Adam huffed, starting to circle Curtis again in search of an opening. “You can’t just go around claiming everybody for your team, it’s not fair.”

“I’m not a recruiter, I’m just a referee. I have to call what I see,” Curtis answered. Adam moved in for another strike but he was blocked again, this time ending up smacked in the back just hard enough to make him yelp. “Besides, I only said it was a little bit gay, not completely gay. Fly your bi flag high.”

Adam whipped his staff around hard when he was hit, giving in to his temper without thinking and briefly trying to really hurt Curtis. The other man saw it coming and blocked it, then grabbed the staff and pulled it out of Adam’s inexperienced hands.

“I think we’re done for today,” he said calmly.

“No, I’m not finished practicing,” Adam insisted.

“I already warned you twice about swinging at me, no more sparring until you’re out of your mood,” Curtis was perfectly reasonable when he said it, not chastising or snappish like Iverson or Montgomery would be. He tossed the staff back for Adam to catch. “Practice some forms instead. So what’s this guy’s name again?”

“Takashi Shirogane,” Adam grumbled, backing away to fall back into a stance and start slowly moving through forms. “He’s the one they ranked Staff Sergeant right out of the gate.”

“Ah, right, the hotshot who only graduated two months ago but is already on a fast track to Second Lieutenant. I wonder how friendly he got and with who to score those kinds of points.”

Adam bristled at the insinuation.

“He worked hard for it,” he said defensively. “He happens to be one of the best pilots the Garrison will ever see, okay? The guy is fucking Superman, he can do anything he picks up and tries. And he makes it look easy, which I admit is kind of annoying and sometimes I want to like, throw something red in with his whites just to make him walk around wearing pink in retribution.”

“That’s right, he’s still your roommate,” Curtis remembered, resting his chin on the top of his staff. He had a knowing little smirk on his face that Adam chose to ignore. “Even though you graduated months ago, and can completely afford the rent on your own. You do his laundry too?”

“Oh my _God_ , listen to this shit,” the question completely derailed Adam’s defense of Takashi and put him on the offensive. He spun around to face Curtis, winging his staff off to the side and sending it bouncing across the gym mat. “He was doing his darks but didn’t have enough for a full load, so he decided he was going to grab some of my stuff too. I caught him trying to put my Bottega Veneta sweater in the washing machine. Do you know how much they cost? That shit is cashmere!”

“The horror,” Curtis said dryly.

“I almost committed a murder, Curt,” Adam insisted. “It was a two-minute span of my life when I was completely willing to go to prison. That man isn’t allowed anywhere near the laundry room, I will rip his throat out with my teeth. He’s not allowed in my kitchen either. He put a fucking Toaster Strudel in the oven instead of the toaster, but he paid no attention to the directions and just left it in there at 425 for an hour then wondered why the smoke alarm was going off.”

“Wow, he must be really pretty if he’s not dead yet. Do you have a picture?”

“Why the hell would I have a picture?”

“Let me see,” Curtis requested.

Adam scoffed and walked over to the bench where their water bottles and phones were. He picked up his phone and unlocked it, scrolling through it to a picture of Takashi before handing it over.

“Look at him, he’s _awful_.”

“You have a whole gallery dedicated to him,” Curtis noted. Adam wasn’t listening.

“And he drinks things right out of the carton,” he groaned, throwing his arms up in overdramatic annoyance and pacing a little. “I don’t use anything in the fridge that doesn’t have my name written on it because his mouth’s probably been on it at some point.”

“A video would be better, do you have a video?” Curtis asked.

“Why the _fuck_ would I have a video?”

“Nevermind, I found them.”

“And you know what else?” Adam asked, now stepping up onto the bench to add that to his pacing as he slowly moved around Curtis in frustration. “He brings home flowers every few days. He switches up between lilies and gerber daisies depending on my mood because he knows if he puts a vase of flowers on the living room coffee table I’ll shut up and go sit by them to do my course work. Who the hell gave this stupid, stupid man my goddamn cheat codes?”

“Yeah, little bit gay,” Curtis said casually, still looking at the screen of Adam’s phone. “Trust me on this, Adam. Gail declared me the Mom Lesbian of the group last month, knowing things is part of my job.”

“I am not part of your gay pack, Curt.”

“Yes you are,” Curtis disagreed, still calmly watching the videos on Adam’s phone. “I’m adopting you. I’m officially your mom now, and I totally love my closeted bisexual son. But if it makes it any easier, this Shirogane guy is certifiably gay. You can tell sometimes when you see them move in a video, it’s a certain kind of BDE.”

“He is not…that is…you are the _worst_ …” Adam sputtered, grabbing at the phone in Curtis’ hand. He easily held it out of reach. “Someday you’re going to have to grow up, you know.”

“I’m four years older than you,” Curtis answered, still agonizingly calm and unbothered, as the phone started to ring. “Your husband’s calling.”

He lowered the phone enough for Adam to grab it. Adam shot him a glare as he turned to stalk across the mat and answer.

“Hey. Did you land in Seattle?”

“Hey, yeah,” Takashi’s voice came over the line, tired and drained. Planning a funeral and handling the relatives that would be coming in from around the US and Japan was a lot more than most eighteen-year-olds had to deal with, it was understandable. “There was a delay, but I just got here. I can’t find my hotel reservation and I don’t have access to my Garrison email, can you check for me and forward—”

“I put a printed copy in your carry-on,” Adam answered. He’d known Takashi would forget something. “Front pocket, left side.”

“Oh.” Some shuffling. “Got it…but can you send—”

“The car rental reservation is under it,” Adam cut him off. “There’s a travel bottle of Aleve in your suitcase for the air pressure headache, and I changed your dinner reservation from McKormick’s to Hikari. I got you a bigger table in case your uncle makes it in early.”

“Hikari is expensive, what was wrong with McKormick’s?” Adam could hear him poking through his suitcase, followed by the sound of the Aleve bottle being removed and opened.

“It’s a seafood restaurant, there’s too high of a chance your aunt’s food might come into contact with shellfish,” Adam threw up a hand in annoyance, pacing again. Seriously, these were not hard things to remember. “And I know Hikari is expensive, that’s because it’s actual Japanese food. It’s a hard time right now, let your US relatives have something from home. There’s already an open tab for your party on my card, use it.”

“Adam—” Takashi had that long suffering tone he used when he was about to be subjected to something that wasn’t cheap. He wasn’t necessarily frugal, he just didn’t see the point of many of the finer things.

“Reservation is at Hikari,” Adam cut him off by talking right over him. “Same time, and there’s five extra seats.”

“All right, all right. I gotta go, I’m at the car rental counter and I’m next.”

“Make sure you lay down for at least an hour when you get to the hotel, you barely slept last night,” Adam ordered.

“I will. Thanks, babe.”

Adam froze. He could hear an equally awkward silence on the other end of the line as Takashi realized what he’d said and was probably in the process of trying not to die. It took a moment, but Takashi finally managed to break out of his stupor.

“Bye,” he said hastily.

“Bye,” Adam answered just as quickly, slamming the button to hang up the phone. He went to put it back down with his water bottle, finding Curtis still leaning idly on his bo staff and watching him.

“Completely heterosexual,” Curtis observed.

Adam grabbed the staff he was leaning on, irritably ripping it out of his hands and making him stumble. Curtis caught himself before he fell, but the humor was gone from his face when he turned back to Adam.

“I’m going to give you a pass this afternoon because your totally straight not-boyfriend is sad and out of town, but when you come back on Monday your attitude better be adjusted,” he advised. He wasn’t nasty or angry about it, First Lieutenant Duchesne was always very calm and moderate about things. But he put the lower ranking soldiers in their place when he needed to.

“The temper has to go, Adam. You’re getting better but you _need_ to stop with the physical lash outs. You’re only a couple months out of the academy, this is the time when superiors are looking at you and deciding whether you’re worth putting energy into. You’re an amazing pilot, but they also want to see discipline.”

“Okay, okay,” Adam grumbled.

“I mean it,” Curtis said firmly. “They’ll be deciding where to put you over the next month or so. Do you want to be flying in a unit with everyone you graduated with, or do you want to be grounded as a backup because you don’t seem like the type who will take orders while in the air?”

Curtis gathered his things from the bench, clapping Adam on the shoulder as he passed on his way out of the gym. “Text me when you’re back in town on Sunday. Gail and Ryan want you to come out with us.”

“I’m not joining your gay pack, Curt.”

“Too late,” Curtis called over his shoulder as he slipped through the metal double doors.

Adam was left alone in the gym, to practice on his own. He wasn’t that great with a staff, he’d stuck to regular hand-to-hand and using a knife during their self-defense courses, but with the loss of hours worth of homework with graduation he had needed something to fill some of his free time. He’d picked learning the bo staff for no real reason other than that Takashi had mentioned using one while in martial arts classes when he was younger. It seemed like a simple enough weapon, something he wouldn’t maim or kill himself trying to learn.

Curtis had been in his circle of friends since he was a senior and Adam a freshman, he had taken a similar class for similar reasons after graduating and was decent enough to practice with. He was definitely no professional, but he still wiped the floor with Adam during their off-hours sparring sessions. It was frustrating.

Adam began practicing forms again, trying not to be irritated. It had only been a few months, obviously he wasn’t going to learn instantaneously. But he still felt like he should be better by now, like he should know more.

It was the nature of the change that told him his dreams were being disrupted and intentionally pushed into something else.

He shouldn’t have noticed the blue mat on the floor fading into the copper-scented soil that had been brought up to the outpost to soak up blood and avoid constant cleaning. It shouldn’t have caught his attention that the rows of workout equipment became empty arena seats, or that the climbing ropes and pull-up bars became rusting metal ship pieces meant to provide cover and hiding spaces.

If it was still a dream, he wouldn’t have noticed that he was no longer holding a lightweight practice staff. That his fingers were wrapped around the heavier weapon he had picked at and modified into a far more precise killing tool over several months.

Adam ran his tongue absently along his teeth, feeling the unnaturally sharp points of canines he had long since begun filing down as he let his eyes trail around the empty arena. He knew he wasn’t really here, which was just another indication that this wasn’t a dream. He was awake now, caught up in something else. Pulled into someone else’s perception. He turned slowly, searching, and in the end Honerva wasn’t difficult to find.

She stood off to the side of the arena, wearing the cloak he had always seen her in before. This time she had the hood back, fully showing a face that she wasn’t camouflaging in the colors of a part-Galra. Adam had always known her as Haggar, as the witch whose face he couldn’t see. He still didn’t know much more about her as Honerva, there hadn’t been much time for him to be filled in.

“What do you want?” Adam didn’t even bother to try and hide his distaste. “I thought I got rid of you.”

“Do you really want to be rid of me?” Honerva asked, stepping away from the wall. “How much did you take?”

Adam tensed but forced himself not to back away. He was not actually here, this was just her gift of weird hallucinations. He was…well, he wasn’t sure where he was. Probably fallen asleep in the cockpit of the Sincline, perfectly safe for the moment with Lance and Romelle.

“You don’t have to answer,” Honerva responded to his silence. “We both know there were only three doses in my lab. And we both know that when you run out you will become very, very happy to see me. I’m sure you remember what happened with your escape three phoebs ago, or should I remind you? Maybe you’ve forgotten. Literally crawling back, begging, in pain while your body betrayed you.”

Adam watched her start to slowly circle, feeling his anger flaring. He was doing his best to ignore the repercussions of leaving the outpost, he was not happy to be reminded.

“So I’m a drama queen, sue me,” he managed to keep his voice level in spite of the way the hair on the back of his neck stood up as she moved out of his view. He wanted to keep his eyes on her at all times but he refused to show how nervous she made him. “If you think that’s bad you should’ve seen me at the end of _Infinity War_.”

“Your big words are cute, but you really don’t have much time,” Honerva answered indifferently. “The pain is just your body realizing it’s metabolized everything and can’t make more of its own. Do you know what’s hiding in your DNA? A hunting instinct that will kick in after that, when your brain becomes unable to keep making the right chemicals. You’ll try to get what you need from fresh food, try to take in enough of the right nutrients for your body to make what you need. But you can’t, it’s just not possible.”

As she came around his other side she was much closer, only an arms length away.

“You’ll go for the smallest ones first, that’s what predators do. The weakest, the easiest to take down. And you won’t stop once you start, not until there’s nobody left for you to hunt there. Maybe one of the older ones will try to stop you…maybe Acxa, or the Blue Paladin, but I doubt they’ll have much success. You’ve been killing every day for the last decaphoeb and a half, that’s an impressive pile of corpses on your resume. You’ll manage to take them out as well before your body finally shuts down and you die, surrounded by the torn apart bodies of ‘rescued’ Altean children.”

Adam glared at her, pouring every ounce of hatred and anger he could into the look, wishing he could kill her with intent alone. He wanted to say something cutting, hit her with a smart remark, but nothing came to him and he doubted he’d be able to properly deliver a retort even if he could think of one in the first place.

He was scared. Terrified. He had been since he’d found out Lance and James were on the outpost and knew that he was going to have to leave to make sure they were safe. Adam remembered his initial escape all too well, the victory of finally getting out of his collar after months of work and escaping down to the planet’s surface on a supply runner. He didn’t need to be reminded of what he’d gone through after that, the aches and pains that had quickly grown unbearable and the gnawing sensation of a hunger he couldn’t identify.

He was well aware of what was coming this time.

“So, say I was willing to come back,” he tried after a moment, his curiosity getting the better of him. “What’s the point? I mean, what is it you even want from me, and why would I want to stay alive longer just to get dropped in another stupid arena somewhere?”

“Much like many of my delicate things you destroyed in your childlike tantrum, you are an irreplaceable artifact,” Honerva replied. “You’re part of a species that is considered extinct, a very useful one. I could search the universe, perhaps find a purebreed or two somewhere, but why bother when I have you right here?”

She moved forward and he flinched when she reached up to hold is chin in her hand. She saw the fear and smirked.

“Your blood and what’s in it is all I need directly from you, and now war is coming. You no longer need to be tossed into an arena to keep you entertained, there will be plenty of opportunities to let you loose to hunt. In fact, there’s something I want that I’m very confident you can bring me.”

She used the grip on his chin to turn his face to the side, showing him that they were no longer alone in the empty arena. The man who stood there was more like a statue than a person, empty eyes staring straight ahead as he stood there simply as an illustration. He was a few inches shorter than Adam, a scar across his nose and a white patch at the front of his hair. The sleeveless uniform he wore showed one black, artificial arm, and the whole image made Adam’s eyes narrow.

“This is not the real man,” Honerva cut him off before he could say anything scathing. “This is a copy. It’s a clone that walks among the people on Earth and it’s mine, one of only two that I have left. The man from your memory is dead, he has been for a long time. He’s the reason you were here, because Sendak knew he would come if you called. He still will, and you betray nothing by luring him to me because he isn’t real.”

Honerva let him go, taking a step back, and he was finally able to breathe again.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” she said harshly. “I’ve seen inside your head. Earth has been free of the Galra for half a decaphoeb, and none of the people you sacrificed yourself for during the invasion have noticed you might not be dead. Your mother didn’t want you, your sire saw you only as an attempt to pass on dying genetics, your only serious lover left you, and your military forgot you. In the grand scheme of humanity, you are so very unimportant.”

Adam had to admit, she knew how to hit where it _hurt_. She talked about him being rejected so casually, but the words left a sting he knew wouldn’t go away for a while. It was nothing he hadn’t already thought about himself before but man, she didn’t have to be so mean and say it out loud.

“On the other hand, you have the opportunity to bring back an entire species,” Honerva added. “Earth is not for you, Cozakul. I have no more use for Galra outposts and no need to keep you leashed and muzzled anymore. Bring me Lotor, call Kuron to me, and in exchange I will not only keep you healthy but give you a freedom you never had on Earth. You can go anywhere you want within reason, you won’t have to hold back when you’re angry or just want to hunt. All I want is to continue my experiments on Altea Beta in peace, and in return I will let you be everything humanity tried to smother out of you.”

Adam glanced sideways at the image of Takashi. He’d spent so much of his life chasing that _irritating_ man, and the last year and a half of his existence in daily physical and emotional torture because Sendak wanted some Shirogane bait. It was so many levels of so many different things; anger, pain, rejection, sadness, regret, and on some days even a little touch of madness when he wondered what it would be like to just not fight that day and let himself be put out of his misery.

“I’m not giving you Lance or James,” Adam said finally, pulling his gaze away from the image. “Or any of those kids. They’re on their way somewhere safe, and I am not just abandoning them to drag your wayward kid back to you.”

Honerva stood with her arms crossed, not looking at him. She was gazing around the empty arena, considering.

“Very well,” she said at length. “I can give up the Blue Paladin if I get Kuron. I have no use for your human friend, and there are plenty of other Alteans to take the place of a handful of missing children. I will let you get them on the way to Earth without pursuit, but I expect at least a token gesture on your part.”

“Animal sacrifice?” Adam asked sarcastically.

“You will regularly send me the coordinates of where you are, and in return I will tell you how to extend the life of your injections. When you get the others far enough, you will bring Lotor and Kuron to me and we will resume your daily dosage.”

Adam crossed his arms and looked away from her, trying to keep his expression neutral. She was offering to not chase them, to give everyone a chance to get a head start to Earth. If they could get far enough, they could make contact with this Coalition and get to safety, maybe that was worth a deal with the devil.

And honestly, Adam had never expected to make it back to Earth himself anyway.

“…fine,” he murmured. “How do I extend the shot?”

“I’ll tell you that after you hold up your end and tell me your location,” Honerva answered.

“And how do I know you won’t just take that information and come kill us all?” Adam asked.

“Because you and I both know you’re going to try to be sneaky and tell me where you’ve been, not where you are,” Honerva responded. “And I have no interest in playing hide and seek. All I want is a basic idea of where you’re traveling so I know where to go when you’re ready to bring my son to me.”

Adam heaved a frustrated sigh, his fingers curling into fists.

“I don’t know anything about the mapped universe,” he ground out. “All I can tell you is what I heard over the comm system. Our first wormhole jump took us to something called the Surtega system, the second one took us near a star called ‘Mononeia,’ I think. The last jump was a couple hours ago, it dropped us into the Dezarene system.”

“Good boy,” Honerva cooed.

“So how do I extend the shot?”

“Insist on making landfall,” Honerva answered, turning to walk away. “Hunt, go after animals in the _Kvedozka_ family. They’re very common on many planets, they have a purple tint to their blood. Drink it while it’s fresh and warm, it has a compound that will help. No solid food, stick with that for your meals and a dose will last two days instead of one.”

The arena slowly receded along with her retreating form, leaving him standing alone in the middle of nothing. But that only lasted a second or two before he became aware of the floor under him and started to wake, feeling queasy at what he’d just heard. Or imagined he’d heard.

He was sitting in the Sincline cockpit, slumped against the pilot’s chair. His neck was a little bit sore, but that was likely because he had his head laying against Romelle’s lap. She had a hand resting on his hair, but she lifted it away when she felt him shift.

“Oh, you’re awake,” she whispered. “That’s good. How do you feel?”

“I hurt,” Adam said honestly, sitting up carefully. His back ached from his position, and his body felt like a giant bruise. The lasershot injury at his side didn’t help. “What’s going on?”

“We made another wormhole jump,” Romelle answered, still being quiet. Adam looked back and realised it was because Lance was passed out asleep in the other cockpit seat. “Acxa’s trying to go for distance.”

“We can’t run nonstop forever. Are we close enough to the ship to hail?”

“Sure. Hold on a second.”

Romelle was doing much better with the Sincline, after the initial hour of instruction. She moved them in a little closer to the ship and opened the comms while Adam absently looked over the consoles and overlays. They had already figured out that the Sincline was meant for three pilots for peak functionality, and that any one of the three could override to control the whole mech if no other pilots were present. The overlay nearest to Adam showed this, an outline of the mech and red marks in the cockpits of the top and bottom ships.

“You’re up,” Acxa noted as she came up on the comm, taking stock of Adam and Lance. “How are your wounds?”

“Peachy,” Adam answered. “When are we going to make landfall? We’ve already jumped like, a thousand times. We need to take stock of what we have and take care of any problems as soon as we can, otherwise we’re risking being caught out in open space when an issue comes up.”

“We should make a few more jumps,” Acxa disagreed. “The more distance we can put between Honerva and us, the better.”

“Until we make a jump that fries a taxed engine or something and leaves us to die in space,” Adam pointed out.

There was no point to further jumps, he already knew that. Honerva was aware of their basic direction now, they were just stressing their ships for no reason. He also wanted to make use of the advice he’d been given as soon as possible, for the safety of everyone in a confined space with him.

“Look, injuries need to be assessed, supplies need to be checked, and water can always stand to be refilled or topped off,” he said when Acxa looked reluctant. “We need a fresh water planet with flora and fauna. Civilized would be great, but we need those basics at least.”

“Fine,” Acxa sighed, running her fingers over her console. “There are three known planets in this quadrant that fit those requirements. None of them are home to any intelligent life, we’d be camping on any one of them.”

“Good enough. Pick the closest one and head for it.”

To be perfectly honest, Adam hated being a leader. After graduation he had willingly not fought Takashi for that role in their unit because he hadn’t wanted it, and after the other pilot had left for Kerberos Adam had accepted the promotion only because he hadn’t wanted to subject the rest of the unit to a stranger. He would have liked to hand over the reins here as well, but Acxa made it clear she preferred not to lead as well by giving in so quickly when he made a decision.

The others were simply too young. Lance and Griffin had the technical skills but not the life experience, and Romelle wasn’t really a leader. He was stuck with it for now, until he could hand everybody over to someone else.

“Hey,” Adam sat up straighter, stretching his back and glancing over to make sure Lance was still asleep once Acxa ended her communication. “Do you know what a…kvedozka is? I heard the word somewhere and it’s bothering me.”

Romelle looked at him like it was a strange question, and admittedly it was. But not strange enough to really bother her, she simply shrugged it off.

“I think on Earth they’re called mammals,” she answered. “Or something like it? I’m not totally clear on what a mammal is. The Galra spread kvedozkas through the universe when they colonized, most planets have them. Most animals with fur are kvedozkas.”

That didn’t sound so bad. Adam had killed plenty of things like that in the arena when there weren’t other prisoners to go up against.

He slouched back down, stretching out, and waited for them to arrive at their destination. It was about an hour and a half before a planet began to fill the viewscreen, growing larger and larger as they approached.

Adam had never seen a planet from space, his trip to the outpost from Earth had been made in a cell and once there he had only been free to roam anywhere with a window at night. There were stretches of brown desert and gray mountains, and sprawling green jungles and forests. The closer they got the clearer he could see giant, snaking rivers sneaking their way through the land to join the deep blue seas. It had clouds, swirling lightly overhead, and looked achingly similar to images of the beautiful blue planet he came from.

He didn’t even realize he’d gotten to his feet and leaned over the consoles to look until he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Lance awake.

“You should sit down,” Lance told him, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Don’t pull that wound more than you have to.”

“Says the walking bruise,” Adam scoffed. Still, he took the offered seat and waited out the landing with a tired sort of patience.

The Lorelia headed for a forested area that bordered on a wide canyon, at a point where dawn was just beginning to approach. It made berth in the bottom, in the smooth bed of what might have once been a lake or might hold water in wetter seasons, as cover in case anyone came looking. Romelle brought the Sincline down in the canyon near it, setting it to kneel and powering it down. The mech’s floor lights turned on, as if politely guiding them to the door.

Lance went first, climbing down to the mech’s foot, and Adam helped lower Romelle down while he helped her keep her feet. Once she was steady, Adam looked up and out over the scenery.

He immediately locked up. His heart started to pound and he felt lightheaded, something in the back of his head screaming that there was danger. It was too wide, too open, nothing above but sky and no closed-in walls. He was backpedaling before he even knew what he was doing, slamming into the copilot seat and hitting the floor, scampering backwards until he hit the console. He didn’t stop until he was kneeling in front of the pilot seat, half-under the console with his arms on the chair and his face buried in them, trying to breathe.

Adam had the desperate, insane thought that he wanted his cell. The safe, closed-in space, the walls marked with his own carved writing, the place where he ate and slept with its familiar single blanket and smooth metal floor. There was nothing here, no containment, no control. It was the farthest thing from the outpost, with its narrow hallways and low ceilings.

He heard someone come in and footsteps on the cockpit floor, and couldn’t help the way he tensed when somebody touched his shoulder.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Lance’s voice came from his right. “It’s just us.”

“You all right?” James’ voice on his left, another hand on his other shoulder.

Adam shook his head. He had no way of explaining what the problem was because he knew they wouldn’t understand. _He_ didn’t even really understand. He had wanted to be free for so long, but now the thought of being out in the open was terrifying.

He heard Lance leave, then James crouch down next to him. The younger man’s hand rested on the middle of his back, a slightly reassuring weight, but he didn’t say anything else. He waited, wordlessly, until the sounds of footsteps returned. Two pairs, this time.

“Close the door,” it was Acxa’s quiet voice, followed by the light in the cockpit changing as Lance pushed the door most of the way closed.

A lighter weight than Lance came over to his right side, kneeling next to him, and another hand on him. This one pulled his shoulder gently, trying to get him to sit up. He took a deep breath and complied, relieved that the light and the sky and the _open_ were closed off. Acxa offered him an opened bottle of water.

“Just breathe,” she told him gently. “Slowly. They call it star sickness, and it will pass. It’s common in people who have been on ships or stations for a long time then brought planetside, especially slave labor and captives that have other trauma on top of it. Real gravity is different from artificial, so is the atmosphere. It wreaks havoc with the senses in ways you can’t see, causes a fear response.”

Adam tried to do what she said. He sat back on his heels, slowly taking deep breaths through his nose and releasing them through his mouth. He went through half the bottle of water before he started to feel semi-normal, his heart rate finally slowing. Every now and then somebody would call from outside and Lance would peek out the door and say something, but for the most part they were left alone.

“You want to try again?” James asked after about a varga. Adam capped the water bottle and nodded, slowly getting to his feet.

“Yeah, let’s see how this goes,” he mumbled. “Just…let me go slow.”

Lance went ahead of him, opening the door and stepping out to climb down. Adam reached the doorway of the cockpit but found he now had a new problem as his view of everything suddenly went dark. He stopped, grabbing the edges of the doorway to keep from falling, letting out a low curse.

“What’s wrong?” James asked. “Do you need a little more ti-OH MY GOD!”

James let out the near-scream as Adam turned to look in the direction of his voice. It was followed by Acxa screaming out of surprise as well, which was of no help whatsoever.

“What’s going on?” Lance’s voice came from just outside the cockpit door and Adam instinctively turned toward that, which immediately earned him another scream. That one was followed by the sound of Lance falling down the side of Sincline.

The problem was the light from the sun that had now risen. There was no real sunlight in space, which meant people who spent a lot of time on ships spent a lot of time in artificial or low light. The eye upgrades Adam had were medical grade prototypes designed for Galra citizens, specifically those who spent a lot of time on ships. They worked very well in normal, low, or no light, reflecting like a cat’s at some points or switching over to electronic night vision at others.

The eyes worked like normal eyes, by sending signals to his brain. But that meant that when there was too much light, there was a risk of sensory and brain overload. And there were failsafes for that.

The failsafes were the carbon fiber nictitating membranes that slid closed across his eyes of their own accord, blocking out light to protect his eyes. One trade off was that he couldn’t see in bright light. Another was that he apparently looked very freaky with blacked out eyes.

“You’re not helping,” he complained, tightening his grip on the doorway after hearing Lance fall. “None of you are helping.”

“Well I’m sorry, they didn’t teach exorcism at the Garrison!” James said indignantly.

“No, it’s fine, just ignore me,” Lance’s groan floated up from the ground. “I didn’t need a fully functioning spine anyway.”

“I can’t take much more of you people,” he heard Acxa mutter under her breath. She sounded like she was patting her chest, as if recovering from a near heart-attack. Adam felt her hand on his arm, pulling him back away from the open doorway. “Let me see your face.”

Adam tilted his head down and felt her touching his face, pulling his eyes open wider to get a better look at the membranes. There was a little bit of pressure as she used a thumb to push one back, making him wince at the light, then released it to let it slide closed again.

“Your eyes will need to be adjusted when you get back to Earth,” she said finally. “The sensitivity needs to be dialed down, that’s not something we have the tools to do. We might have some protective eye gear on the ship, though, in the engine room.”

“On the plus side, you can’t see what’s out there to be scared of it,” James said helpfully. Adam heard him move to the cockpit door and look down. “Will you get up, McClain?”

“I would love to, but my foot is stuck,” Lance called back. “And you’re all ignoring me.”

James sighed and Adam heard him climbing down to help Lance. He felt Acxa’s hand on his arm again.

“Come on. I’ll lift you down, the membranes should retract once you’re over in the ship.”

“You’ll lift me down?” Adam repeated. “I’m almost two hundred pounds.”

“And I’m Altean.”

“I have no idea what that even means.”

A moment later, Adam learned what it meant. Acxa held one of his hands and easily lowered him down, supporting his full weight as he felt his way down the side of the mech. When his feet were finally on solid ground Lance hooked his arm and led him across the canyon to the Lorelia, where the blackness finally bled away once he stepped into the lower light of the ship’s insides.

It was smaller than a cruiser, but definitely bigger than an average cargo ship. Acxa led them through a hallway, toward the back, and Adam inspected the rooms they passed through open doors.

“This isn’t a war ship,” he noted. “Does it have any weapons?”

“No, it’s a runner,” Acxa answered. “She’s built for speed, to come and go between bases with supplies.”

By bases, he knew she meant the two Altean colonies.

They came to the small docking bay where the stolen shuttle was parked. Romelle was already there, talking to some of the younger Alteans. Acxa ordered them away to go help Paylan do a supply inventory, leaving herself, James, Lance, Romelle, and Adam alone in the docking bay.

“Once everything’s checked and we’re stocked and ready to go, we’ll do another jump to leave you in friendly space,” Acxa announced. “You can take the shuttle and call for a pickup to go back to Earth.”

“I’m sorry, what makes you think we’re going to just let you wander off with a murderous ex-emperor again?” James asked. “Just trusting you two psychos with a bunch of kids? No way. You’re coming back to Earth and they’ll deal with you there.”

“James,” Adam warned.

“No, he’s right,” Romelle agreed, glaring at Acxa. “Lotor isn’t just walking away with one of his generals after everything he’s done!”

“Everything he’s done,” Acxa scoffed, returning her glare with annoyance. “He didn’t _do_ anything.”

“No, I’m pretty sure he tried to kill me and some other people,” Lance interjected. “My brain’s not completely up to date but, I have a firm grip on that little bit of fact.”

“Okay, he might have tried to kill you,” Acxa allowed in response to Lance. “But lots of people have tried to kill you, _you_ should be used to it!”

“Yeah, but not people I trusted!” Lance shot back. “Just like I’m not used to people I _trust_ pulling guns on me and my team leader and kidnapping me off planet!”

“And can we just revisit for a second the fact that _you shot me_ ,” James added.

“Well I wasn’t really aiming for your knee, you moved!” Acxa exclaimed.

“Oh, so me having a weird cyber Galra leg is my own fault now?” James demanded.

“You’re lucky I didn’t accidentally shoot higher!” Acxa huffed. James looked appalled, and Lance and Adam winced in sympathy at the very thought.

“All right, everyone calm down for a second,” Adam finally spoke up. Emotions were running way too high, and he was the only one here who hadn’t been involved in any of the things accusations were flying about. “James and Lance have every right to be angry about what happened to them, and nobody has any right to tell them they shouldn’t be. And Acxa, I think they also deserve to hear the full story and know why they went through what they did.”

Acxa looked around at anyone angrily, upset at being put in the position she was in before she was ready. But that was life, nothing was fair.

“Come on,” she spat, heading for the shuttle. She opened the door and motioned for them to go in, and when the others hesitated Adam stepped ahead of them and boarded first.

Lotor was no longer on the floor. He was sitting on the bench seat along the back of the shuttle, awake and alert and very much handcuffed to one of the large eye-hooks meant for securing freight to. He looked up as people began to come in, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh good, it’s a party,” he said dryly, looking to Acxa. “Or am I a zoo exhibit now?”

“Don’t mind Lotor, he’s currently recovering from being a filthy liar,” Acxa answered.

“There’s a cure for that,” Lance said from where he’d come to stand beside and slightly behind Adam. “On my planet the word is “drowning.”

“Wonderful, the loud one survived,” Lotor returned. “You look a bit different, did you do something with your hair?”

“I’m going to choke you with your hair in a minute.”

“This is exactly what I needed right now,” Lotor turned to Acxa again with sarcastic gratitude. “Thank you so much.”

“You shot me out of a ship into space,” Acxa returned. “I might hold you while he chokes you.”

This whole day was turning into a mess of epic proportions, and Adam still didn’t know the entire story of what was going on. He stepped forward and motioned for everyone to quiet down, trying to get some control over the situation.

“Okay, so what I’m getting here is that everyone has tried to kill everyone at some point,” he translated.

“Tried?” Romelle finally piped up angrily from where she was standing behind him at his other side. “Lotor’s very successfully killed thousands of Alteans!”

“That is not what happened!” Acxa exclaimed.

“ _Chill_ ,” Adam said loudly, finally resorting to his teacher voice. “Listen up you little brats, my head is killing me, I’m covered in blood, and the school district can’t stop me from beating any of you out here. We’re going to have a conversation, it’s going to be productive, and anyone who gets disruptive is getting left on this planet when we go. Romelle, elaborate.”

“Lotor spent thousands of years gathering survivors after Altea was destroyed and forming a colony,” Romelle was shooting Lotor a look fit to kill, but still half-hiding behind Adam. “He told us he had formed a second colony and started taking gifted Alteans there, but it turned out that colony never existed. He was draining them of their quintessence for his personal use. He killed thousands!”

“And you of course have some evidence of this,” Lotor said, raising his eyebrows.

“I saw it for myself!” Romelle returned. “I saw the pod with my brother in it crash into the colony! I saw you gathering the wreckage and covering it up! And when Keith and Krolia came we went up to the moon facility and saw all the Alteans in those tubes!”

“That’s not what you saw, Romelle,” Acxa said testily. Adam pointed at her warningly.

He had to take a moment. He now had two very conflicting descriptions of the Altean colonies that supposedly existed—or, in one case, didn’t exist. Both descriptions were coming from women he knew to be Alteans, and who claimed to have first-hand knowledge. He felt like he was back in the auditorium moderating the debate team while they screamed at each other over the idea of euthanasia.

“You and you, sit,” he pointed James and Lance to opposite sides of the shuttle, to the benches running along them. Then he pointed Romelle and Acxa to opposite sides as well. “You and you, also sit. Laurence, you just don’t talk at all, your face annoys me.”

“My name is—”

“Don’t talk to me.”

He grabbed the metal case of artifacts he’d taken from Honerva’s lab and turned it sideways, sitting on the edge to face them all.

“Okay. Romelle’s said what she saw,” he said finally. “Acxa, explain.”

“The place Romelle was being kept isn’t a colony, it’s a rehabilitation center,” Acxa said firmly. “It’s a domed memory chamber built for multiple patients during recovery. The moon lab is a medical facility.”

“That’s a lie, I saw those people in those tubes!” Romelle exclaimed.

“Living people, being treated for quintessence overexposure,” Acxa returned. “You were treated for the same thing, you just came out of the pod sooner.”

“That’s not true, I know what I saw!”

“But you _don’t_ know what you saw!” Acxa stood up in frustration. “You’re a supply pilot! You and your brother were in an accident while moving concentrated quintessence and you were overexposed! The abandoned ship that started the whole mess and led Keith to you in the first place was _your ship_!”

From the shocked silence, Adam gathered that this was some kind of revelation. Though honestly, the most unbelievable part of that was that Romelle was a pilot.

“Bandor is very much alive and well,” Lotor was the one that spoke this time. “At least, he was before _someone_ set off a group of trigger-happy teenagers who ultimately caused the second colony to be cut off from support.”

“Those are pretty big words coming from the guy who Allura threw across the bridge so hard he bounced twice,” Lance snapped.

“I recall. In fact, I was never given a chance to explain myself at all before Haggar’s little puppet Shiro grabbed me and dragged me back to the witch,” Lotor responded. “And Acxa tells me that while he was doing that, you all were trying not to be murdered by a virus he’d uploaded to your ship.”

Adam saw Lance shoot him a look at the mention of Shiro’s name, but he ignored it and pretended he hadn’t heard. It was a tidbit he tucked away though, a confirmation of Honerva’s words that the Takashi that was out there was just a copy of the original.

“Okay, stop,” Adam commanded, rubbing his temple. “Let’s start from the beginning. Acxa, they’re not going to believe anything you say unless you show them.”

Anger flashed in her eyes at being outed, but Adam didn’t have enough time left in his life to drag everything out. He needed everyone to come clean with everything they knew so it could be decided what would actually be done with Lotor.

She sat back down, crossing her arms and glaring at the floor. As she did, the crests faded away and her colors shifted back to her original Altean appearance.

“I’m a doctor, okay?” She spat. “I know what happened on that facility because I ran it. We built it right within the edge of the quantum abyss so that patients would have time to heal and recover there while only hours or days passed in real time. It was less dangerous that way.”

“So that’s why you knew how to treat me after we brought Sincline out of the rift,” Lance frowned, staring at her in open surprise. “You were already treating Alteans for overexposure?”

“We were. The Galra way of gathering quintessence by harvesting planets is unsustainable, we wanted a clean and less limited energy source to help build up the second colony. Gifted Alteans volunteered to work on rebuilding the rift gate from Diabazaal, fully aware of the very real risks.

“In the beginning, before we perfected the extractor pods to siphon off the excess, a lot of them died…informed and voluntarily. Once we did perfect the pods, the pure quintessence we siphoned off them during recovery was transported to the second colony. Romelle and Bandor piloted one of the transport ships, but on one of their trips they were pulled off course by the abyss star’s gravity and collided with an asteroid. I was their doctor, I treated them both. Exposure affects the memory…both pilots were in recovery while we tried to restore them. Bandor got better first and went back to piloting, Romelle was still in rehabilitation when Keith arrived.”

Adam was watching Lotor while Acxa spoke, looking for those tiny things that gave a person away. He wanted to see if there was a reaction, if he would do anything while she was talking that would point to her telling a lie. Lotor had stopped looking at anyone else, instead his eyes were on the floor and he looked resigned.

Romelle still looked furious, but there were tears starting to well up in her eyes as she started to drift from confidence to uncertainty. Lance was pensive, probably because he was living proof that overexposure affected the memory. James looked more confused than anything, like this was his first time being pulled into this. Nothing concrete was going to come from a discussion between these people.

Adam got up from his perch and left the shuttle, ignoring the questioning looks of the others. He crossed the loading dock and went down the hall they’d come through, stopping by the door to grab one of several work jackets hanging on hooks. He pulled it on as he went, covering the blood on his flight suit as he made his way toward the bridge.

He found five Alteans there when he arrived, all of them looking up at him curiously. He recognized two of them as having been on the shuttle with Lance, the other three were likely the ones who had been crewing the ship while it orbited. The “older, jaded” kids Acxa had mentioned.

“Hey,” he greeted, raising his hands to show he didn’t have any kind of weapon on him. None they could see, anyway, just the knife down under his pant leg. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare anyone. Can I talk to you guys for a few minutes?”

They all looked at each other, then back at him warily. Understandable, he was a human and they were apparently pretty against those.

“It’s about Lotor.”

“Is he okay?” One of the girls who was with Lance blurted out, looking worried. “Acxa said he’s sick.”

“Tiselle,” an older girl said warningly.

“He’s all right,” Adam answered, gesturing to an empty seat at a nearby communications console. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

None of them said anything, so he sat on the edge of the seat. He stretched his legs out in front of him, folding his hands and letting them hang down between his knees. He was looking up at them now, and he slouched a little to make himself a bit smaller. Less threatening.

“So you’re Tiselle, and you’re Farla, right?” He asked Lance’s two compatriots. They nodded slowly, and he turned to the oldest girl. She was standing at a console in the middle of the bridge and would probably be the one creating the wormholes. There was a boy to her right and another girl to her left. “And you’d be Camille, Vylar, and Keera. I’m Adam.”

The younger ones seemed pliable enough, but he could tell the older ones were far more careful. They had been scooped up unwittingly by Honerva and he had a feeling they knew she was on the wrong side. But they’d likely had no support anywhere and so many young people to try and look out for, it was no surprise they hadn’t rebelled before now.

“We have a slight problem,” Adam told them. “We’re trying to figure out where to go from here, but the big issue is with Lotor. See, Honerva told us that humans destroyed your colony and she saved you. But someone else is telling us Lotor destroyed it. And weirdly enough, there are no adults around who know the whole story and can tell us.”

“Lotor would never do such a thing!” Farla burst out. “He’s our savior, he built the colonies to keep us safe!”

“Honerva told us the humans were coming when she arrived, she saved us!” Tiselle added. “There’s no reason for the mother of Lotor to lie!”

Vylar and Keera looked noncommittal, like they were unwilling to get into an argument about it either way because they weren’t sure. But Camille…Adam could tell she had something to say.

“All right, good enough I guess,” he supposed, getting back to his feet. “Acxa said I could find some protective eyewear in the engine room, can you point me to where that is?”

“Back of the ship,” Vylar answered, making no move to even point.

“I’ll show you the way,” Camille decided, waving for Keera to take over for her as she stepped down. She didn’t look at Adam as she passed him, walking out of the bridge and leaving him to follow.

Adam let her take him back through the ship, past the docking bay where he could now hear arguing coming from the shuttle, further on into the engine room. There was nobody here, they were alone as she opened a storage locker and started to pick through it.

“So what do you think?” Adam asked, leaning back against the wall. “You look like the kind of woman who has opinions. I happen to like hearing opinions.”

“What do I think?” Camille repeated. “I think everyone is full of spitz.”

That must have been an Altean curse. He liked Camille already.

“There aren’t many adults because most of the adults go to work on the other colony, terraforming a new planet for us. But there were some with us, and there should be some still among us. But there’s not. It’s also highly suspicious that everyone who was saved is gifted. I have two younger sisters, all three of us went through processing to board the escape ship at the same time, but I was the only one to come out on the other side. Neither of them were gifted.”

“So who do you think destroyed the colony?” Adam asked.

“Was it destroyed?” Camille returned. “I don’t know. I have no way of knowing. Lotor made sure we were safe, nobody found us in the ten thousand years since the colony was founded. I find it very unlikely that he would suddenly reveal our location to anyone who wasn’t extremely well vetted. No, he would have taken that information to his grave.”

“Then how did Honerva find you?” Adam pressed.

“She’s a witch,” Camille answered simply. “The power she uses isn’t just alchemy. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that much. There’s something dark about it, she draws it from somewhere malignant. It makes my skin crawl when she’s near.”

“Do you know Acxa?”

“Yes. She’s one of Lotor’s generals, the only one of them who knew about the colony. Because she was born there, and started out as a doctor there,” Camille said. “Acxa regularly brings back new medical research from the outside world, so we can advance ours. But she disappeared when Lotor did, and only recently resurfaced.”

“What about Romelle?” Adam wondered. “Do you know her?”

“I know of her. She and her brother Bandor were supply pilots, they flew a small runner called the Sorenia. Bandor was gifted, Romelle wasn’t. When they didn’t have to fly, Bandor went to the other colony and Romelle stayed to help raise the children.”

“You’re very talkative when the others aren’t around to hear,” Adam noted.

“I’m not an idiot,” Camille answered, finally pulling out a pair of what looked like full eye sunglasses. She shoved them against Adam’s chest. “I saw Honerva twist that boy’s memories, and I saw how confused Romelle was when she came back to us. You’re not charming anything out of me, Nixa, if there are competing stories out there I just want you all to get everything straight.”

“Okay,” Adam took the glasses and raised his other hand in surrender. “Two more questions, then. One, have you ever seen anyone come back from the second colony?”

“Of course,” Camille scowled at him now. “What parents would go halfway across the universe and never return to visit their children? My mother and father both returned, several times while I was growing up. They made sure my sisters and I knew they hadn’t forgotten us, and that we’d be with them as soon as we were old enough. Most parents returned every few years, when it was safe. Your second question?”

“There was a pod in Honerva’s lab, they used it to siphon excess quintessence from Lance. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

“The extractor pod,” Camille answered. “Anyone who displays the gift before eighteen begins to learn alchemy early, and we’re taught about the dangers of handling quintessence. Extractor pods treat overexposure.”

“Can they be used to drain someone to death?”

“Maybe?” Camille shrugged. “Anything can be used to kill if it’s tweaked enough. But those pods are medical devices, they have about a thousand failsafes in the programming you’d have to get past.”

“Okay.” Adam said again, nodding slightly as he slid the glasses up into his hair. “Thank you.”

He pushed away from the wall and started to go back the way he’d come, but Camille stopped him. She pulled him back and he had to bite back a hiss when she pressed her hand against his lasershot wound, a sharp pain followed by a cool sensation as the ache slowly started to ebb away. When she let him go he lightly touched his side and found the wound gone, healed and no longer hurting.

“Do you think the colony is still there?” She asked. “Do you think my sisters might still be alive?”

“I think…we’d like to find that out,” Adam answered. He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear and that she probably wouldn’t be satisfied with it, but that was all he had at the moment. “Thank you.”

He headed back to the docking bay, stepping back onto the shuttle where everyone had devolved into either sniping quietly at each other or just not talking. They looked up when he came back in, shedding the work jacket and draping it over the pilot seat.

“Where were you?” Lance asked.

“From the mouths of babes,” Adam answered. “The extractor pods are a medical treatment for overexposure, the second colony exists, nobody who went there was mysteriously murdered, and the first colony hasn’t been destroyed. You’re welcome. Now somebody tell me why Leroy is handcuffed.”

“My name isn’t—”

“I said don’t talk to me,” Adam warned. “Tens don’t converse with fives or lower.”

“Lotor has a quintessence problem,” Acxa said darkly, crossing her arms and shooting Lotor an angry look. “He promised he was going to keep up with getting clean, but he lied about it to his doctor and then _shot her into space_.”

“You mean he’s an addict and he turns into a raging asshole,” James translated.

“I had just come out of the quintessence field,” Lotor pointed out. “How was I supposed to avoid quintessence at that point? That’s literally all it is.”

“So he didn’t commit mass murder?” Lance asked. “Even if that’s true, he still tried to kill me and the others.”

“And yet you remain, as audibly bothersome as ever,” Lotor answered.

“Know what? I’m about to shove my razzle so far up your dazzle you’ll be spitting glitter for a week.”

“Fine, keep him handcuffed,” Adam ignored the exchange. “Everyone rest today, get some sleep tonight, and we’ll decide what we’re doing in the morning. Acxa, can I see you please?”

“You are _not_ going to just leave me here with this,” Lotor complained as Acxa stood up and followed Adam off the shuttle.

He led her over to the far side of the docking bay, where it was quiet.

“When you say he’s addicted to quintessence, what kind of a problem is that?” He asked. “Can it even be treated?”

“It can be, when he wants to do it,” Acxa answered. “It’s not entirely his fault. Like I told you, he was exposed to the quintessence field in utero, and it had some effects. We’d been working on it for a while, and we’d finally managed to synthesize a hormone mixture that could fight the effects of withdrawal. He ended up going into the quintessence field with Princess Allura before we had a chance to try it, he got overstimulated and…as James put it, became a raging asshole.”

“Do you have any of this synthetic hormone?”

“No, but we have everything we need to make it at the medical facility,” Acxa answered. “In the quantum abyss. It’s reachable easily enough since we know the way, but Lotor is the one who actually created it so he’d have to go. We could take the whole group, but keeping a ship the size of the Lorelia on the safe path would be hard.”

Adam didn’t really want to let Lotor out of his sight, not with Honerva so eager to get her hands on him. He needed Acxa here since the Alteans would trust her, and he didn’t personally trust James, Lance, or Romelle to not just break Lotor’s neck for the hell of it if they got the chance.

If they decided to send Lotor to the medical facility, Adam was going to have to be the one to go with him. That was the only way to ensure he knew where the emperor was when Honerva decided it was time to bring him in.

“Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he told her. “In the meantime, just stop the rest of them from killing him. I’m going to go explore a little nearby, maybe find somewhere quiet to get some real sleep. I’m going to have to get some of the energy out of my system after that, I probably won’t be back until well after dark.”

“What if something happens to you?”

“Then I won’t come back at all, obviously,” Adam answered as he walked away, dancing around the unasked question of how they were supposed to keep track of where he was. That was something he didn’t want them to do.

* * * * * * * * * *

The sky had so many stars it was like the world was lit by some secondary nighttime sun. The openness of it all was still frightening, he still wasn’t comfortable being out in it yet, but his wandering was driven by something more insistent than his own personal wants and desires.

Adam walked quietly, staring off into the distance at nothing, his brain going off on the endless pointless thoughts that always danced through it in the silence of the night. He was acutely aware that he was sticky, the blood smeared around his mouth and down his throat just thick enough that it took forever to completely dry.

He knew he’d passed a stream on his way out, he was just waiting to come across it again on his way back. Waiting for an opportunity to clean away the mess, the slickness between his fingers and under his nails.

For the hundredth time, he dragged his already soaked sleeve across his face to try and clear away some more of the blood, to clean away that annoying tickle of the night breeze brushing against something wet. There was something stuck in his teeth, he poked at it to dislodge it with his tongue. It came loose, settled in his mouth, chewy and slightly metallic.

Adam paused to lean against a tree, unable to stop himself from heaving. The chunks that came up were large and barely chewed, ripped from the source and swallowed mostly whole. Honerva had not been kidding when she said he would be driven to desperate feeding. Animals here had never seen a persistence predator like a human and were easy enough to wear down and catch, and all it had taken was the smell of blood to set him off.

He wasn’t even really bothered by the fact that he was currently digesting raw meat, it was pretty much just the space animal version of sushi. What made his stomach roil was the memory of how it had gotten there, the rending and tearing actions that left his jaw feeling overworked and sore.

It was mostly solids that came up, the blood thankfully remained. He didn’t feel like hunting down something else and going through it all again to top off.

Of course the solution to his problem couldn’t be something simple. Brew up a weird galactic tea three times a day maybe, or chew on some kind of bark that had a helpful chemical. No, he was stuck going weirdly Nosferatu on the interstellar version of Bambi. No such thing as a pharmacy outside of Earth, apparently, heathens out star-hopping just made do with nature, even when nature was still walking around being furry and cute.

Adam was going to choke someone when this was all over. He didn’t know who yet, but he’d already reserved the right to register his displeasure with violence. Maybe Honerva, maybe Lotor. Maybe a couple random Galra, because the universe could always use fewer of them.

He lifted his head when he heard the sound of splashing, of some small amphibian or aquatic animal jumping in water. The stream was nearby.

Pushing away from the tree he continued his search, wanting nothing more than to hide the evidence of the night’s activities before returning to the ship. To the ship, and its cargo of potential future victims if luck didn’t stay on his side.


	10. Chapter 10

The Fire of Purification outpost had not withstood the onslaught of an attack, but Keith had a strong feeling it wasn’t the Honor and Flame faction that they’d fallen to. It was too quiet here, the damage too complete, with no signs of any survivors.

The destruction radiated out from a central point, the only section of the outpost that remained at least in large enough pieces to identify, but everything else was little more than debris. Ships were torn asunder, swathes of the station were obliterated, and bodies floated silently among the remains.

Down below, the night side of the planet was visible, glowing in flames.

“There’s no life here,” Keith told Shiro, starting a second scan running in case the first had missed something. “Not on any ships, not on the outpost, not even on the planet. Something’s not right here.”

He steered Black around the perimeter of the mess, searching empty space for signals. An SOS or a transmission back to Fire superiors, anything. There was nothing here but death. Keith felt a hollowness in his chest, at the base of his throat, as he tried to ignore the fact that even if Lance, Romelle, and James had managed to get together again and get down to the planet below they wouldn’t have survived this.

“Allura.” His own voice sounded alien to him as he hailed the Blue Lion, unable to pull his eyes away from the disaster in front of him. “Has Red stopped?”

“No,” Allura’s response came a few heartbeats later, her image flickering up on his screen. “She’s changed direction several times, though. If she’s following Lance he must be on a ship that’s able to jump. Are you at the outpost? Have you found any sign of where he might have gone?”

“We’re here, or at least at what’s left of it,” Keith sent her a feed of what he and Shiro were seeing, silently praying she was right and that Lance wasn’t here. That none of them were here. “It almost looks like something exploded out here. Maybe one of Honerva’s mechs self-destructed?”

“I don’t think so. The resulting force would have sent most of the debris out of the planet’s gravity and flying through space.”

“It feels heavy here,” Shiro spoke up, finally pulling his eyes away from the viewscreen to look at Allura. “I can’t really describe it. It’s oppressive. Like the air is thick, but not just the air. I can feel it in my nerves.”

“If all of that damage was done by Honerva’s magic, it’s possible the quintessence in your arm is reacting to it,” Allura reasoned. “But still…there’s nothing left untouched there, it’s horrifying to think she’s capable of destruction on that scale on her own.”

“The planet is also burning,” Keith pointed out, switching Allura’s view. He paused when an alert came up on his screen. “I have a hit on something of ours. The reading is coming from the epicenter.”

“What could even survive this?” Shiro wondered.

“It depends,” Allura frowned. “That area looks like it’s mostly untouched. If Honerva did this, it’s possible that’s where she was standing and that anything in it was within her personal safety zone. ‘Safe’ being an arguable word here.”

“If it was her, she’s not here now,” Keith said. “Keep following Red, Shiro and I are going to move in and take a look.

“Be very careful, Keith. She’s getting stronger.”

Keith ended the transmission and nudged Black forward, into the heart of the carnage. There was something melancholy about it all, the silent ruins of what once was likely thriving. He could see and hear things hitting the Lion’s hull as they passed through, parting the wreckage as if moving through a sea, leaving things adrift in their wake. Scraps of metal, pieces of wood.

He felt an almost painful sadness washing over him as what looked like a book drifted by, the edges of his pages singed and burnt. A reminder that there had once been people here, noise in the silence. The powerful feeling that something had been lost, ripped from the world before its time.

Shiro’s hand on his shoulder pulled his attention away from the viewscreen. He looked up at the older Paladin and saw him wiping at one eye, it made him suddenly aware that there were tears on his own face.

“Whatever the hell she did here, it’s seeping into everything,” Shiro said softly. “I think that’s what we’re feeling.”

“It feels like…death,” Keith murmured, looking back out at the dark massacre. “Like actual death.”

It felt like standing in front of a casket he was too short to see into, surrounded by sobbing people and the cloying scent of flowers. It felt like sitting in a cold metal chair at a graveside, watching that casket being lowered down below the surface. It felt like the sudden, agonizing punch in the gut as reality set in, the cold ache that snaked through the chest along with the understanding that it was over, that someone so very important was never going to smile or laugh, never going to come home again.

Keith braced himself against it as they reached what looked like a loading dock. There might have been several other floors above it once but they were gone now, leaving little more than a platform with the remains of a surrounding wall. There was a perfect circle of untouched space, with a few crates and items that had been sitting there waiting to be moved floating in the area. They were still, suspended in time, not yet pulled into movement by the planet’s gravity.

“Sensor’s picking up a signal from in the middle of that mess,” Keith nodded toward the untouched spot. “It’s one of the trackers we put in our equipment.”

He stopped Black and put on his helmet, following Shiro out of the cockpit. They were about to climb up to the hatch when he heard a low alert going off to announce that there was a hail coming through.

“Go ahead,” he told Shiro, backing out of the airlock so he would be able to continue. “I’ll go see who it is, might be Allura with something else.”

He went back to the cockpit and dropped into his seat, pulling his helmet back off so he could more clearly keep an eye on Shiro and make sure he stayed safe. The other Paladin appeared in his view, using his boosters to head over to the floating platform. The hail was coming from Kolivan.

“Black Lion,” he greeted, opening up the channel. “What’s up, Kolivan?”

“I was looking for Shiro,” Kolivan was seated at a console in what looked like the building the Blade of Marmora used as a home base. It was two solar systems over from Earth. “I contacted the Atlas, but I was told by Hunk and Pidge that he was with you.”

“He is, but he’s doing a spacewalk right now,” Keith answered, leaning forward to double check that everything was okay. He could see Shiro gently pushing crates and boxes out of the way, sending them to float off into nothing. “Is it important?”

“He asked me to find something for him. It’s a video of an arena fight involving a human captive he thinks may be one of your soldiers.”

“I didn’t know we had anyone missing,” Keith said in surprise. “Send it over, let’s take a look.”

“It’s very graphic,” Kolivan warned.

“I’ve been at war with the Galra for the last few years, I’ve seen graphic,” Keith reminded him as the file came through. He brought it up and let it play. “Do we know what soldier or when he went missing?”

“No. Shiro only gave the name Cozakul, and that’s a gladiator name.”

It wasn’t hard to pick out which one was the human. The Galra in the fight was probably a prisoner promised his freedom if he won, and the human was smaller, thinner, and at a pretty clear disadvantage as far as size went overall. He was quick at least, which helped even the odds some, and fairly vicious. It was pretty hard to see any identifying features since he wore a weird mask to cover his eyes, all Keith could make out was a tawny colored braid and light brown skin.

The fight was exhausting to watch, and it made Keith’s skin crawl. They all knew this was something Shiro had been through, that he’d been dropped into one of these rings and made to fight for his life, but seeing it in action and really understanding what he’d experienced made him want to be sick. Wounds were made, blood ran down bodies and continued to spatter on the floor as both combatants fought for their very lives.

How did anyone even come back from this? How badly did memories of this haunt the older Paladin?

Eventually, the human fighter’s staff broke in a way that even Keith could tell meant it had been tampered with. No decent weapon would split like that with normal use, it had to have been messed with from the beginning. That break immediately turned the tide of the fight, and the human took a blade to the gut in a way that made Keith look away. They’d all been injured at one point or another, but they’d never had somebody intentionally trying to cut out their insides.

The crowd cheered as the fight ended, or so Keith assumed. But when he looked back at the screen to stop the video he could see that the man was pushing himself up from the ground. He was bleeding like crazy but that didn’t stop him from coming up behind the unsuspecting Galra opponent while he celebrated, and reaching around to grip the front of his throat. His fingers dug in and he pulled.

“Oh, holy _shit_ ,” Keith whipped his head away again, unable to keep watching. The crowd got even louder, and he could only imagine what could be happening to rile them up so much.

“I warned you it was graphic,” Kolivan said.

“Yeah, but there’s graphic, then there’s two guys ripping each others insides out graphic,” Keith winced. He waited a minute before braving a glance back at the viewscreen, but at this point both fighters were basically lying unmoving in puddles of blood. “Jesus…well that guy’s dead.”

“The Galra is dead, the human wasn’t,” Kolivan replied. “This was a fighter sent personally to Central Command by Sendak to settle a bet, which is probably why his weapon was sabotaged. He was still alive when he was taken off the floor, but Sendak died before he was returned to him. Instead he was claimed by Haggar, which wasn’t unusual. She’s long had a habit of collecting arena survivors of all species for her experiments.”

“How did you even find that out?”

“Fighters are property,” Kolivan answered. “Livestock. The longer they survive the more they’re worth, and they’re tracked through receipts. Instead of being returned to the base where he was originally kept, this one was transferred to Haggar at the Fire of Purification base in your current quadrant.”

“He was at this outpost?” Keith asked, looking out over the destruction. “Well if he wasn’t dead before, then he is now. This place is destroyed.”

“That’s unfortunate. I’m sorry you lost an ally, please let Shiro know the same. It seemed very important to him.”

“I will.”

"What of the others? Lance, James, Romelle?"

"Still looking," Keith admitted. "The Red Lion is on the move so we have reason to believe Lance is alive. Hopefully that means the others are too."

"I hope that's the case and that you find them safe. And you please be safe as well."

"I will, Kolivan. Thank you."

Keith closed out the communication, then closed the video. It made sense that a captive human arena fighter would be important to Shiro, especially if it was a soldier. Keith wasn’t familiar with everyone at their Garrison location, but Shiro had served with most of them. To know somebody he had probably been acquainted with, maybe even trained beside, was Sendak’s property must have been driving him insane.

Keith replaced his helmet and let himself out of Black, careful to avoid the floating debris and ignore the heavy feeling of sadness that permeated everything as he made his way over to the platform. Shiro was just returning to the edge, carrying a gun and a staff.

“I found these,” he held them up, offering the gun to Keith. “It looks like one of the ones Lance stole from the armory when he left the Atlas.”

“It’s been fired,” Keith observed, nodding toward the marks in some spots on what was left of the walls. “There was a fight here.”

“Could that be why Lance finally called Red? Maybe he was shaking off her control?”

“There are no bodies here. He either got away, or the ship he’s on is hers.” Keith didn’t want to think about the latter being true, he already hated that he’d let Lance come here without direct backup. If his poor decision had led to something worse…

“He’s not alone.”

Keith looked up from the gun to Shiro. He was looking down at the staff in his hands, though Keith didn’t know what kind of staff it might be. One end was formed into a point, a thin metal spike set into the wood to turn it into something akin to a spear. The other end had a deep indentation in it that reminded him of a crochet hook, and the length of the staff was marked with nicks and cuts that might have been decoration done in boredom.

Shiro gripped both halves of the staff and gave a quick, hard tug, separating them. He tucked the end of the pointed half into the hook and used it as a sort of sling, firing the pointed end off toward the Black Lion.

“Okay, that’s weird.”

“It’s called an atlatl, Paleolithic humans used to use them to hunt,” Shiro answered hollowly. “Adam learned to make them from his grandfather, he could take down a buck from twenty yards with the right angle.”

It had been a while since Keith had heard Adam’s name. Shiro never said it, like he was trying to pretend the man had never existed. He wasn’t stupid, ever since they had brought Melenor in for a proper burial and Shiro had reacted so strongly to the glasses Keith had suspected that their deceased original Blue Paladin was Captain Wolfe. But Shiro hadn’t spoken about it after that initial quiet freak out, and Keith wasn’t going to pry. The man deserved to bury at least some of his ghosts on his own terms.

“So it’s a human weapon,” Keith reached out and took the piece of staff from Shiro, turning it over in his hands. “Is that why you had Kolivan looking into a human captive?”

“Did he call in?”

“He did. He sent a video clip.” Keith glanced up at Shiro, then looked down at the staff again. “You think this is Adam’s.”

“I know it’s Adam’s.” Shiro reached over and turned the staff slightly, lifting it and resting his finger under one of the many carvings to draw Keith’s attention to it.

The Galaxy Garrison emblem. Now that he looked, he could see other familiar symbols. The Captain’s rank insignia, the flag of Brazil, the constellation Lupus. Some cuts were fresher than others, as if they’d been added to over time.

The hair color of the man in the arena fight, the shade of his skin, the fact that he had been transferred here into Haggar’s possession, and now a weapon that clearly pointed to a Brazilian Garrison Captain…it was no wonder Shiro had so vehemently insisted on coming along instead of staying back with the Atlas, he had suspected Adam was alive and out in Galra territory.

“You’re not watching the video,” Keith said flatly, handing the staff piece back.

“What is it with you and Veronica?” Shiro asked, irritation creeping into his voice. “I’m not a breakable piece of glass, I’m not going to have an emotional breakdown. I don’t need other people telling me what it is and isn’t okay for me to do.”

“You have a staff you know is his, you have information saying he was here,” Keith tried to keep his own ire down. “You have more than enough to go on for us to assume that if he’s alive, he’s with Lance. The only reason you could possibly have to watch that video is because you want to torture yourself.”

Shiro scoffed in annoyance, but he didn’t answer. Instead he turned on his booster, heading back toward the Black Lion. Keith threw the strap of the gun over his shoulder and followed.

“Have you been to talk to someone yet?” Keith watched Shiro branch off to dip down lower and grab the other half of the staff, which had hit Black and was now floating nearby. “You pushed us all to go to therapy, have you made an appointment for yourself yet?”

He heard Shiro take a deep breath through his nose, that thing he did when he was starting to get aggravated but wanted to keep his voice calm.

“No. I haven’t gotten around to it.”

“Well, you can watch that video when a therapist says you’re okay to,” Keith answered.

He reached the airlock and let himself in, already halfway to the cockpit when Shiro made it inside. Keith went right to the pilot seat, dropping down into it and entering the commands to put all multimedia feeds on lockdown. Usually those files were open for download from the other Lions or the Atlas, to more quickly share recon imagery once in range, but he shut that all down. Then he sent a message to Kolivan, requesting that he suspend providing Shiro with information that wasn’t mission-related until further notice.

“I hope that Adam’s alive for your sake, I really do,” he said out loud when he heard Shiro come into the cockpit. “I don’t know how he would be, everyone said he died in that dogfight. But I hope he is. I just also hope you don’t hold your breath for anything good to come out of it. He didn’t give a damn about you before, he won’t now.”

“Keith,” Shiro’s voice was sharp in a way it didn’t usually get, and he knew he was pressing his luck. There weren’t many things that could really push Shiro's buttons, but this was one.

“No, Shiro. You don’t get it, you weren’t there. However he might have acted to your face, he didn’t care about you after you were gone.” Keith wasn’t fond of Captain Wolfe, at all. He’d never wish death on him, or any of the horrors of the arena, but if he was alive then Keith hoped that if they found him and brought him home he would break Shiro’s heart and move on quickly instead of stringing it out. “The only reason he even showed up at your memorial was because Iverson required him to, I heard two of the teachers talking. And even then, he walked in an hour late and stood in the back on his phone the whole time.

“He didn’t pay any attention, he didn’t go up to say anything. He showed up, he was bored, he left early. I hope you don’t think he shed any tears over you, because he didn’t.”

It wasn’t anything Keith had ever considered telling Shiro before, because by the time they’d returned it didn’t matter. Captain Wolfe had been killed in combat, and Keith hadn’t wanted to poison Shiro’s mourning with the truth. He had thought that his brother would be sad, get past it, and start to move on, and he thought it would happen much faster than usual since Shiro had been in space so long without seeing his ex in the first place.

But apparently, in Shiro’s case the term “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was painfully accurate.

“You’re not being fair,” Shiro said softly from behind him.

“I’m not being fair?” Keith repeated, glancing back. “I’m not being _fair_? I’m stating the facts, there’s nothing unfair about that. A lot of people were heartbroken when we thought you were dead, Shiro, but he wasn’t one of them. And you shouldn’t even be surprised about that, considering he ditched you for not picking him over Kerberos.”

They were done here, there was nothing else to find within the ruins of the outpost, so he took them out over the planet and began scanning the area for wormhole activity. As soon as they were out of the perimeter of the destruction he felt a weight lifting off his chest, as if Honerva’s magic had left behind some physical reminder that had to be shrugged off.

He heard Shiro moving behind him again, the sound of a helmet being removed, and then the older Paladin moved into his field of vision to lean against the side console.

“I never should have told you about that conversation. That was my mistake.”

“Whatever,” Keith muttered, angrily punching in the scan commands.

“No, it’s not ‘whatever,” Shiro insisted. “You were a kid, I was an adult. You were the last person I should have been letting off steam about that kind of problem to. I’m not perfect and I was even worse then, I was angry and upset and I turned you into a sounding board so I could spout off my side of the fight without being contradicted.

“Our breakup wasn’t one-sided, neither of us just stopped loving or abandoned the other. We both chose to go in the direction that was best for ourselves, and we each protected ourselves in our own way. It _hurts_ to let someone you love walk away, Keith, but you do it because you love them and you know they need to. Adam didn’t give me an ultimatum or try to force me to choose him over Kerberos, he made it clear that if I did what I needed to do for me, then he was going to do what he needed to do for him.

“But you’re right on one thing, I do hope he’s alive. And if I can bring him home and he’s moved on and doesn’t want me, then that’s fine. At least I can finally tell him the things I want to and have closure.”

Keith didn’t really want to hear it. He didn’t like Adam, he never had. The older man was cold and distant and never seemed to care about anything, he was just a shallow rich boy who kept Shiro on his arm for the fame. His only real regret for Shiro’s sake was that the two of them hadn’t broken up sooner so he could find somebody who cared about him enough to support him in something so important to him while he was sick.

He didn’t want to have this conversation. He changed the topic back to the one he was interested in.

“So are you going to make an appointment with a therapist?”

“When I get to it.”

“No, Shiro, soon,” Keith insisted, turning in his seat to look up at him in exasperation. “I went to therapy three times a week for six months, I keep going every couple weeks, and you’ve heard me still wake up screaming every now and then. Pidge has nightmares that stop her from sleeping for days, Hunk still has to brace himself for a minute before he gets in his Lion half the time, Lance has flashbacks. Poor Allura still locks up when she sees fire sometimes. There’s no way you haven’t been affected by what we’ve been through, I can see it on your face and the way you get tense out of nowhere.”

“Keith, can we talk about this later?” Shiro groaned, rubbing his temple.

“No,” Keith bit out. “I love you, Shiro, we all love you. You’re part of our family. You spend so much time trying to take care of everything and everyone else, can you just step back for a little bit and take care of yourself? There’s nothing wrong with admitting that you’re fr—that you’re just not one hundred percent.”

Keith knew he used the wrong word before he even said it, but his backpedaling didn’t work. It was the one word Shiro absolutely hated to hear used in reference to him and he picked it up on it immediately.

“I’m not fragile.”

There was an edge in Shiro’s voice that didn’t come out often. He was so easygoing most of the time that people forgot he could bite when he wanted to, but he had his triggers. Specifically, being treated the way so many people had treated him back when he was sick.

He was also much more defensive than Keith had thought he would be about Adam, which didn’t help.

“I’m not broken. I appreciate that you’re concerned, but I’ll talk to somebody when I’m ready to.”

He was shutting down the conversation, forcing Keith to abandon it. He didn’t want to, he wanted to press the issue and explain to Shiro that he just wanted to help him be healthy and happy. That was all any of them wanted for him.

The scan turned up residuals from several wormholes. Keith forwarded the readings to Allura, and before he finished Shiro had left the cockpit to avoid further conversation. He sighed and let his head fall back against his seat as he turned Black around, setting course for Allura’s last coordinates.

He wasn’t good at this. He could read people, but he couldn’t communicate his own feelings to them very clearly. That was one of the ways Lance came in, the other boy was a disaster when it came to reading people, but he knew how to say what people needed to hear. Lance would have stopped him before he’d stupidly vomited all those things about Adam and put Shiro on the defensive.

Keith closed his eyes for a moment, absently reaching up to touch the necklace that lay beneath his under-armor. It was a silver chain with a small pendant, a little glass disk half-filled with what looked like water and tiny gold flakes. Technically it was Shiro’s, given to him to hang onto the day he’d left for Kerberos. Keith had tried to return it after the Last Stand, once he’d gotten out of the hospital and finally went back to see if his little desert shack was still standing.

It had been in ruins, unsurprisingly, but the metal canister he’d kept buried on the property with his valuables in it had been intact. Shiro hadn’t wanted the necklace back, he wouldn’t even look at it. Which was fine, Keith had grown fond of it.

Keith pulled up the feed of the Lion’s hold on his viewscreen to see what Shiro was doing. He was sitting on the edge of the bed back there, messing around with a phone.

He put Black on autopilot and slouched down in his seat, wishing he was better with words.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years ago**_ :

Keith plugged the stopper of the blue five-gallon canister, making a face at the droplets of kerosene he’d accidentally spilled on the side. The smell was always horrific when it spilled, and the plastic of the canister was impossible to get entirely clean without a full scale scrubbing. If he wasn’t careful he’d end up with it on his hands, which would take ages to clean off and leave him smelling like the gas station he worked at for hours.

He brought his numb fingers up to blow on them, trying to get some feeling back into them. It was freezing out here and he only had his t-shirt, the stupid green collared shirt with a crooked name tag hanging on his chest. When he could finally move at least one hand properly again he lifted the canister and carried it carefully to the beat-up pickup truck parked beside the station, trying to put it into the back without rubbing it up against himself.

There were only two customers when he went in, stepping from the freezing cold outside into what felt like an inferno. The heat was up way too high and the Christmas music being piped through the speakers was way too loud. He went to the back to collect his paycheck for the week from the day manager, then over to the side counter to cash it out. Ninety-eight dollars and change, and the kerosene cost him twenty bucks per canister. There was a cold spell coming, he was going to have to go easy on the spending if he didn’t want to freeze.

He found Jack, his coworker, over by the microwave heating a burrito. Keith grabbed two hot dogs and a boxed slice of pizza, mentally counting out the cost plus tax.

“Ready to go?” Jack asked as his burrito came out of the microwave. Keith grunted an affirmative and followed him up to the register to pay.

Jack was an older man who supervised Keith on the second night shift, when he came in to relieve the other clerk working first shift. He knew Keith didn’t have transportation and usually hitchhiked or walked to work, and since he was going the same way he often dropped him off at home.

They didn’t speak much during the rides. Jack liked to turn on the radio and relax in comfortable silence, and Keith never knew what to say.

It was mid-morning as the pickup truck pulled off the main road, loudly kicking up gravel and dust in the New Mexico desert. Jack put the truck into park and turned down the radio, nodding toward the shack in the distance.

“Looks like you got company.”

Keith glanced up from taking off his seat belt, at the figure on his porch. Whoever it was, he couldn’t see from this distance and he didn’t recognize the Jeep parked beside the shack.

“You gonna be okay alone?” Jack asked.

“Yeah,” Keith opened the door and slid out of the warm cab, into the cold winter air. If whoever it was had touched anything of his they were going to get shanked, Jack should probably worry more about the interloper than him. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Thanks though.”

He retrieved the bag with his dinner and the canister from the back of the truck, and waited until Jack pulled away before he started the trek to the shack.

Whoever was on his porch was likely a man, given the height. They were sitting in the old rocking chair there, one foot up against the corner post holding up the roof. It was barely twenty-five degrees out today, so they were probably crazy to be sitting outside. Or whoever it was had sat down there and just died.

As he got closer he saw the heavy coat, and the soft puff of fog that indicated breathing. Then he saw the messy bronze hair and the glint of light off glasses, and he was immediately on guard. Adam’s head shifted a little and Keith knew he was noticed, but the older man didn’t move from where he lounged in the chair.

Keith had never really liked Adam. Shiro had wanted them to get along, but there was just something about the guy that had always made Keith’s skin crawl. The first time Shiro had brought his boyfriend with him when coming to hang out with him Adam had been cordial but Keith had been very uncomfortable, and Shiro had sensed the mismatch and not pushed them again. They had an unspoken agreement to be civil when they were both around Shiro and to ignore each other completely otherwise.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Keith asked as he stepped up onto the porch, skirting wide to make sure he wasn’t within the other man’s reach as he went to the door to unlock it. “I don’t remember inviting you onto the property, I should call the cops.”

“I don’t think squatter’s rights count if you’re under eighteen and can’t actually own property,” Adam answered.

Flat. Toneless. That weirdly emotionless and inhuman voice that only seemed to fluctuate when he was manipulating people. Keith had seen him be endearing, almost sweet, but he had never seen Adam be _nice_. It reminded him of all those specials about serial killers, the ones who everyone thought were such great people right up until they were arrested.

Yeah, Adam felt like the kind of person who had bodies buried in the woods.

“Doesn’t answer the question of what you’re doing here.” Keith got the door open and put the kerosene inside, tossing his food bag on the thin, old futon and grabbing his red jacket from where he’d forgotten it in his hurry to meet his ride to work last night. He pulled it on, doing his best not to look as cold as he felt as he stepped back outside. “Or how you found the place.”

He had his knife tucked under the back of his shirt in case he needed it, and he made sure to keep enough space between them in case he needed to get it out quickly. Adam still didn’t get out of the chair. He continued to rock slowly, reaching down to pick up something he’d had leaning up against the wall of the house. He held up a spiral-bound notebook.

“Found this,” he said, switching hands and holding it out for Keith to take. “I’ve graded enough of your work to know your handwriting. You also have directions to three different places scribbled in the back, and they all start in this area. You’re not a frigging ninja so believe me, I didn’t put in a ton of effort to track you down.”

Keith leaned forward and took the notebook, then moved back out of reach. He flipped it open to check and yes, it was one of his. This was the one he couldn’t find the other day to double-check his notes on the cliff caves.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Where’d you leave it?” Adam asked, sipping from the flask Keith hadn’t noticed in his hand. “I found it while I was rock climbing.”

Rock climbing. In his cliffs. Great, the last thing Keith wanted was to run into Adam somewhere even more secluded than the shack.

“Should you really be drinking if you drove here?” Keith asked critically, opening the door and tossing that inside as well.

“Aren’t you a little too young to be my dad?” Adam returned. He tilted his head a little to glance back at the shack, his eyes running over the cracked frame of the old doorway, with its screen door hanging half off its hinges. “And a little too occupied to be worried about what I’m doing? Does this place even have utilities?”

“It’s not any of your business,” Keith snapped. It was nobody’s business what he did with his life. “If you’re so worried about what I do, maybe you shouldn’t have gotten me kicked out of the Garrison.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have pulled a knife on an officer.”

“Maybe that officer shouldn’t have deserved it,” Keith returned. “You brought my book back. Thanks. You can go now.”

Adam looked completely untouched by his words, there was no way to tell if they bothered him or not. He blinked less than other people and had a stare that made him seem almost as if he’d forgotten he was looking at you. Instead of leaving he fixed Keith with that stare, his gaze dropping after a moment to the t-shirt he was wearing under his light jacket.

“You’re working at a gas station?” Again, no real tone. Keith couldn’t tell if it was a genuine question, or if Adam was making fun of him.

“It’s a job,” he answered with a shrug.

A part time job, because nobody wanted to hire anyone who was under eighteen full time. Even the gas station had been wary, they didn’t let him sell cigarettes or work the lottery machine. He spent twenty hours a week either stocking the few shelves of the food mart or ringing up junk food and gas, but it was an honest job.

And it left him plenty of time for what he really wanted to do, which was figure out the secret of those carvings in the desert.

Adam stood up and closed the distance between them with disturbing quickness, mostly thanks to simply being so tall and having longer legs. Keith felt a hand touch his face, but it was so brief it was gone and the older man had turned and stepped away again before he could pull out his knife.

“You’re freezing. Do you even have heat here?”

“I said it’s none of your business,” Keith defended. He didn’t know what part of that Adam didn’t understand.

Shiro was dead. He was gone. There was nothing linking the two of them anymore, they didn’t have to tolerate each other. Keith wasn’t even part of the Garrison anymore, he just wanted to be left alone to fade away into the quiet oblivion of the desert.

Adam stepped down off the porch and went to his Jeep, and Keith waited to make sure he got in and got off the property before he went inside. But he didn’t, instead he opened the passenger side and fished something out, returning to the porch to shed his coat. He tossed it on the rocking chair so he could maneuver better, shivering and making an annoyed face at how cold it was as he opened the checkbook in his hand.

He wrote something out with a fountain pen that Keith knew was stupidly expensive. He remembered being with Shiro when he’d bought it, trying not to be nauseous at the lovestruck look on his mentor’s face as he’d shopped around for a birthday present. He’d put a lot of work into that search, which at the time Keith hadn’t known why he’d bother. Adam seemed to him to be a spoiled brat who would hardly appreciate the effort behind something as not-stylish as a simple pen.

Honestly, Keith hadn’t expected him to keep the thing at all, let alone still be using it a handful of months after Shiro’s death. It wasn’t _designer_ enough for Adam Wolfe to be seen using.

Adam put the cap back on the pen and tore a check off of the book. He held it out with two fingers, and Keith took it more out of curiosity than anything. He raised it to look at it but was distracted when Adam touched him again, this time using the pen to lift the small pendant hanging around his neck up for a better look. It was a simple thing, a glass disk with water and little gold shavings.

Keith smacked the pen away and gripped the pendant, hiding it from view almost protectively.

“Nice. Not exactly something I’d expect you to wear.”

“It was Shiro’s,” Keith said defensively, before Adam could accuse him of stealing it or something. “He gave it to me to hold onto the morning he left for Kerberos. He said it was really important and to keep it safe.”

He was almost afraid Adam would tell him to hand it over. Keith didn’t know who the executor of Shiro’s estate was, or if anyone had actually been called in to handle that, and he didn’t know how much of a claim Adam had to Shiro’s things. They were broken up, sure, but they’d still been living in the same apartment right up until Kerberos. For all Keith knew, Shiro might have had a will leaving everything to his ex that had never been changed before he left on the mission.

“Hm.”

That was Adam’s only response. He tucked the pen behind his ear and adjusted the heavy sweater he was wearing, clearly not liking the cold. Keith looked at the check in his hand and only barely managed not to choke, not expecting to see an amount with four zeros before the decimal point written out to him.

“Must be nice to be rich,” Keith muttered.

“It is,” Adam answered indifferently. “Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys cocaine and good whiskey and I’m told that’s a wonderful substitute. It should tide you over until you’re old enough for employers to take you seriously.”

“I don’t need your charity.” Keith held the check back out for Adam to take. “I don’t need it, and I don’t want it.”

“Then throw it away,” Adam answered, shoving his hands in his pockets and heading back toward his Jeep. “Tear it up, frame it, sign it over to someone else, burn it. I don’t care, I won’t notice the difference in my bank account either way.”

“You forgot your coat,” Keith pointed out, crossing his arms irritably and nodding his head toward the coat laying across the rocking chair. Adam didn’t even look back.

“Keep it.”

He climbed in the Jeep and started it up without waiting for an answer. Keith watched him until he was gone, feeling a wash of different emotions.

Shame at someone finding out how he was living. Embarrassment for _who_ it was that had discovered how his life was turning out. Anger at Adam for just showing up even though his presence wasn’t wanted, regret at having fallen so far from what Shiro had wanted for him. Resentment over the implication that he couldn’t take care of himself and was only a missed paycheck away from begging.

Keith grabbed the coat off the rocking chair and headed inside, throwing it on the futon and tossing the check on the table. He moved piles of paper and sketchbooks out of the way, piling everything neatly in the corner and away from the far wall of the room. That was where the kerosene heater sat, cold and dark since he’d run out of fuel for it two days ago and had to wait for pay day.

He pumped the tank full and lit it up, letting himself shiver from the cold now that he was alone with nobody to see, then went around to make sure the front and back doors and window were locked. He checked the tape around the window edges to make sure all the drafts were kept out, and pressed rolled-up towels against the bottoms of the doors to keep the cold at bay.

The room would be warm soon, but it would take a little bit. In the meantime Keith sat on the futon with his knees pulled up and grudgingly gave in, pulling the abandoned coat over himself like a blanket.

It was heavy, down-filled and lined with thick, soft material that seemed to grab and hold his body heat. It smelled familiar, in a comforting sort of way that made Keith annoyed.

_He’s started wearing Shiro’s cologne_.

That rubbed him the wrong way, almost more so than anything else. Scent was so linked to memory, the last thing he wanted was to catch a trace of cologne on the air years from now and remember Adam instead of Shiro.

He sighed and lowered the coat to test the temperature of the room. It was starting to get warmer, soon he would be able to comfortably eat and then get some sleep. As he raised the coat to cover himself back over for a few more minutes he caught side of the tag, and the bold, block-letter writing of soldiers who habitually labeled everything that might end up shoved into a locker on base.

_T. Shirogane._

Adam wasn’t wearing Shiro’s cologne, it was Shiro’s coat. Probably packed up and carefully stored before he’d gone, wrapped in something air-tight to protect it if it still had faint traces of scent to it. Keith sighed and wrapped himself back up in it, letting himself slide down to lay on the futon. His stomach felt hollow and he was no longer hungry.

He drifted off at some point, wrapped up in the familiar smell, and slept for the rest of the morning.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

Keith glanced over at the viewscreen again. Shiro had moved by now and was laid out flat on the bed, eyes closed as he listened to music from the phone instead of going through it. Keith had had to turn off the sound because he’d been playing one song on repeat, and after the third time it had started to drive him up the wall.

He absently played with the pendant around his neck and thought about the shack in the desert. About his brash decision to run away from the group home before he was eighteen, the feeling that he would show them all that he didn’t need them. The careful budgeting he hadn’t known how to do, the harsh winter he hadn’t been prepared for. The spans of days at a time when he hadn’t eaten because it came down to a choice between heat and food.

He had cashed Adam’s check. He hadn’t had a choice, there were no other options. Maybe life would have been a little easier once he turned eighteen, but he never really got the chance to find out. Shiro had crash landed back on Earth two days after his eighteenth birthday, and that was the beginning of everything.

The coat was one of the things he had given back to Shiro, it had been tucked away in the closet of the shack and had only suffered some dust when the building had collapsed in the invasion. Now that he thought about it, it was a little bit weird that Adam had been walking around wearing Shiro’s very not-designer coat when he was known for being a fan of high end fashion.

_Sort of like you refused to take off Lance’s jacket_.

Keith scowled as the unbidden thought flitted through his head. He was not about to give that asshole any benefit of the doubt.

He checked to make sure Shiro was still distracted and brought up the video Kolivan had sent, watching it again. He stopped it places, zooming in and out and trying to get a good look. The skin tone was right, the hair color was right. He was tall, and moved in a way that was similar to the liquid way Lance and Rachel had moved on the dance floor.

There was no reluctance in the end, even bleeding out it was as if pure spite moved him to get back up and advance on his opponent from behind. No hesitation, he reached around and ripped out the unguarded throat like it was something practiced he had done before. There was anger in every movement, like something pent up that was finally released.

Yeah…Adam had always felt to Keith like the kind of person who had bodies buried in the woods.


	11. Chapter 11

“Your thoughts are all over the place. I need you to focus on one thing.”

Lance scrunched up his face in concentration, trying to follow Camille’s instructions and pick a single train of thought. The problem was that there were many trains of thought to choose from, but most of them were missing station stops. He would settle on one thing, and since the human mind wasn’t stagnant his brain would wander along its natural progression until it eventually hit a blank wall.

Which was fine, that was the point. Camille was doing her best to help undo the damage Honerva’s druids had done, but before she could untangle the knots of each blank spot Lance’s brain was bouncing on to something else and wrenching itself out of her influence.

Lance wasn’t a complete blank, he could function. Things were coming back, sometimes a little bit at a time and sometimes in chunks. It depended heavily on what he was thinking about and what was going on that his brain made a connection, the difference was now that Honerva wasn’t meddling the memories that did come back stayed.

He remembered a lot about Adam now, and in talking to him he remembered a lot about Hunk and Pidge. They didn’t talk about Shiro, but his thoughts naturally went there and many of his memories had returned. Interacting with so many Alteans and their technology had brought back a lot of his memories of Allura and Coran. He remembered the Red Lion, the suppressors had been fried before they could wipe that memory back out.

He didn’t need anybody to help him remember Keith. Relaxing quietly and thinking about the last few run-ins with him helped him trace that thread back, all the way to his Garrison days. Maybe it was kind of terrible, but even though he had yet to remember his family (he had a vague recollection of having parents, brothers, and sisters), he very vividly remembered Keith.

“Maybe we should take a break,” he suggested, giving up and opening his eyes. “You’re getting frustrated. I’m sorry.”

“We’re both getting frustrated, it’s just making everything harder.” Camille dropped her hands away from his temples and brushed the pink hair from her face, her dark skin visibly damp in the humidity of the day. “I’m sorry, I’m just not on the level of a full druid. The weather here isn’t helping.”

This was their second time making landfall in only a few days, at Adam’s insistence. A wind storm had begun to brew before dawn on the last planet and they’d decided to launch before it got bad, since none of them knew the planet’s weather patterns to know if it was safe to stay. They had not made the jump into Coalition airspace, because the question of what to do with Lotor still remained. It couldn’t be ignored that they were currently harboring the notorious Galra emperor and about a dozen Alteans who had been following Honerva up until a few days ago, and none of them were quite sure yet if they were willing to hand those people over to the Coalition.

The planet they’d landed on had seasons, and they’d chosen a dry spot that turned out to be in the midst of a humid summer. Lance hadn’t seen Adam since that morning, he’d disappeared off into the woods like he had the other day, and they couldn’t exactly discuss viable options without him here. He seemed to be the only one capable of making an objective decision, since he wasn’t technically on anybody’s side.

Camille went to go cool off in the ship, and Lance wandered over to where Romelle and James were sitting against a rock outcropping in the grass. Romelle had also been undergoing ‘treatment’ with Camille’s help and she was pretty shaken up, and had been very quiet. She spent a lot of her time either hiding in the cockpit of the Sincline or sitting off to the side with Lance or James.

“Hey,” he greeted, leaning back against the rock to look down at the two of them. He tapped Romelle lightly on the top of her head. “How are you doing?”

“Okay,” Romelle gave a slight shrug. “Still trying to process. I’ve been living one life for a year and now it’s being peeled away to show another life hiding under it, it’s very strange. Yesterday, all I knew about being in a cockpit was what Adam showed me. Today I can list off the components of an average ship console from memory.”

Lance glanced over at James, who looked up at him at the same time. He was pretty sure the same thought was flitting through both of their heads, given that James perked up the same way he had.

“So…you remember how to fly a ship?” Lance asked.

“For the most part,” Romelle answered. Lance looked back over at James.

“Maybe you’d remember the rest if you like…practiced?” James asked, taking that cue.

“Maybe,” Romelle supposed. “Camille might let me have a try at the helm of the Lorelia, but that would mean—” She broke off, looking accusingly back and forth between the two of them. “Wait, you’re trying to get me to take you up in Sincline!”

“Oh, come on!” James groaned. “Look at it, it’s freaking cool!”

“We already tried to take it up ourselves, but it won’t even let us in!” Lance added.

“Of course she won’t let you in, you want to treat her like a toy,” Romelle scoffed. “No joy rides. She’s tired and she only has one pilot to charge her, leave her alone.”

“She.” All three of them jumped at the new voice as Lotor came around the side of the rock, looming over them all without even trying. “Sincline is a she now, then?”

Adam had made them take the handcuffs off and give Lotor freedom of movement. They weren’t allowed to lock him in the shuttle or keep him on the ship, either, he was just allowed to go and do what he wanted. That was perfectly fine with the Alteans, who were all more than happy to cater to him, but it left a bad taste in Lance’s mouth.

He very much remembered the fight in the quintessence field, and the laser battle leading up to it.

“What do you want?” Lance asked, annoyed. “You have literally an entire planet to bother, do you really have to be in this little corner of the clearing?”

“I don’t have to be anywhere, I choose to be in this little corner of the clearing,” Lotor answered, matching his annoyed expression. “And I don’t think I could have been more obviously not speaking to you if I tried. Clearly I was addressing Romelle.”

“Jade is a she,” Romelle answered with a slight shrug, looking down at her hands as she started picking at her fingernails. “Opal and Carnelian are both he.”

“You named my ships?” Lotor asked, raising an eyebrow. Lance glanced down at Romelle in time to see her finally look up at him with her own air of irritation.

“They’re Allura’s ships,” she responded confidently. “She’s the one who attracted the…whatever’s in them, not you. They’re not very impressed with the way you acted the last time you piloted and they don’t like you. And I didn’t name them, they came with names.”

Lotor looked between James and Lance as if to see if they understood what Romelle was talking about.

“Sentient things have their own names, what’s so hard to understand about that?” Lance asked. He pushed away from the rock and stepped forward, making a shooing motion with both hands. “Come on, leave her alone. She’s already having a hard enough time without you standing over her blocking the sunlight.”

“Don’t wave your hands in my face,” Lotor warned, reaching up to put two fingers on Lance’s forehead and push him back a step.

It wasn’t meant to start a fight and Lance knew it, but he actively chose to take it that way. He wasn’t going to be a pushover, and nobody put their hands on him without permission. Especially not Lotor, whose spine he wanted to break on principle. Bracing himself, he planted both hands on Lotor’s chest and shoved him backward, hard.

It made Lotor stumble a few steps, and for a moment he looked surprised at Lance’s newfound strength. That surprise quickly shifted to anger, and he closed the distance and gave Lance a shove back just as hard.

“Oh, are we gonna go?” Lance asked, starting to roll up his sleeves. “Are we finally doing this? Good, it’s been a year since one of us has kicked your ass, you’re overdue.”

“Okay, no. No no no, not good,” James scrambled to his feet and threw himself between the two of them, holding his arms out to try and block Lance while Romelle grabbed him from behind.

“What’s wrong?” Lotor asked lightly. “If he so desperately feels the need to be embarrassed, let him go.”

“I’m guaranteed to get at least one punch to your face whether you take me down or not,” Lance said hotly, pulling against Romelle’s hold. “And believe me, after what you did to Allura a little pain is worth breaking one of your stupid cheekbones. She trusted you, _we_ trusted you! But all it takes to make you flip your shit is one little Daddy Issues comment? You’re a self-centered asshat!”

“What’s an “asshat?” Romelle whispered to James.

“ _Lance_.”

The call came from the edge of the clearing, where Adam had arrived. The singed and blood-soaked flight suit he’d worn when they left the outpost had been disposed of, replaced by one of the lightly armored flight suits aboard the Lorelia. Like the Paladin armor it molded to its wearer, making his size a non-issue. There was some fresh blood marking his breastplate now though, making Lance wonder what he’d gotten into.

“Break it up,” Adam commanded. “You too, Leonard.”

“My name is—” Lotor began through clenched teeth.

“I don’t care,” Adam spoke over him, snapping his fingers for James and Lance to come to him.

And he didn’t care, his voice was the toneless one Lance sometimes heard him use when he was completely neutral on something and didn’t feel like expending energy on pretending it was important. Lance was pleased to see that the very fact that someone literally did not care about something he was saying seemed to irritate Lotor more than anger or aggression.

They didn’t want to leave Romelle behind, but she waved for them to go ahead. As much as Lance would have preferred to stay there and stand between the two of them he knew that if Romelle wanted to face off with Lotor it was her choice. He followed James across the clearing to join Adam just within the tree line, where they found a dead animal that reminded him of a deer.

It was fairly clear that Adam had dragged it back using the ropes he’d had in the pack he took with him when he left, but Lance had no idea how it was actually killed. The neck had been split pretty badly, which could have been the cause of death or could have just happened during dressing.

“God, real food,” Lance said appreciatively. “Not that the green stuff on the ship isn’t fine, but seriously.”

“You hunt your own food?” James asked.

“You’ve never eaten a catch?” Adam asked, motioning for help. Lance stepped forward and helped him lift the animal up so it could be hung from the lower branches of a nearby tree.

“We never hunted,” James admitted. “I know people who have, but we never did in my family.”

“Lance has never hunted either, but prepping a catch is still a pretty good thing to know,” Adam answered. “Both of you grab your knives and come here.”

James had one on him, but Lance had to go borrow one from the Lorelia. When he returned Adam pointed out that he’d already field dressed the animal, but quickly explained how to empty the organs and why it was important to do so. He explained they hung the carcass to drain any remaining blood, and then showed them how to skin it while it was still warm.

Adam stood back and instructed while he and James worked, setting aside the removed skin and showing them how to quarter with just their knives. It was less hot in the trees but still humid, and they were sweating and messy by the time they finished.

But they had the beginnings of what looked like it would be a great barbecue meal. And it was kind of nice, to forget they were basically on the run from a psychotic space witch for a little while and just do something quiet and calm with his mentor. They carried the meat cuts to a spot in the field away from the ship, where they dug out a small fire pit.

Their work drew the attention of the younger Alteans, who were eager to get involved and help. While Lance and James went to clean up Adam showed the kids how to build a fire. Lance returned from the ship to find him sitting with Ariella and Kildar, using some metal utensils from the Lorelia’s small galley to cook, but he stayed back a little bit rather than interrupt.

He felt bad for these kids. They had been at the mercy of Honerva since Lotor had disappeared, which was going on about four years now. That meant they had been between nine- and sixteen-years-old when they had been stolen away, and had spent the last four years with no real guidance or care except from other children. Even Camille, who was the oldest at twenty and two years older than Lance, sometimes seemed much younger than him because she’d never been able to learn not to be.

They gravitated toward anyone who seemed older, now that they were away from Honerva. Romelle, himself, James, Acxa, Lotor, but especially Adam. And he was far gentler with the Alteans than he was with the rest of them, as if the teacher in him sensed their vulnerability.

Though, overall, Adam was acting strangely these last few days. The problem was, a year and a half fighting for one’s life at an outpost in space, believing Earth was obliterated, was going to drastically change a person. Lance just couldn’t tell if that was what was going on or if there was a different issue to address.

Across the clearing, the four other kids who had initially been with Ariella and Kildar appeared from the trees. They came running happily, three of them carrying bowls they’d stolen from the galley and one with an armful of colorful wildflowers.

“Did you find them?” Lance heard Adam ask as they kids reached him. Denvar tilted the bowl he carried, showing it was filled with bright purple berries, and Adam nodded. “Yeah, that’s them. Put them in the shade until after you eat.”

“Does he have any kids?” Lance jumped as Romelle came up beside him, he found he’d been dozing in the warmth of the early afternoon and hadn’t heard her coming.

“Adam? No,” Lance snorted a little. “He was a teacher at the Garrison. I don’t think he wants kids, they confuse him until they’re at least old enough to understand the word no. Are you okay? You and Lotor were both gone when I came back from helping.”

“I went to go sit in Sincline,” Romelle answered, shrugging slightly and dropping down to sit in the grass beside him. “He said he was sorry for back in the shuttle. For implying it was my fault the other colony got cut off.”

“Wow, Lotor knows how to apologize?” Lance raised his eyebrows, trying to picture that and failing. “Doesn’t strike me as something his nanny would teach him. What’d you say?”

“Nothing,” Romelle replied, worrying her lip. “I feel like it’s partly my fault, I got Keith and Krolia involved and neither of them knew enough about Altean technology to understand the moon was a medical facility. But at the same time I know it wasn’t, because there was no way for me to know my head was messed up.”

“It wasn’t your fault at all, it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Lance assured her. He did not want Romelle carrying around guilt for something she had no way of stopping. “And if there is any fault at all it’s Lotor’s. He’s the one who made the choice to go into the quintessence field with Allura, knowing he’d react to it. He made a conscious decision while he was still of sound mind, and everything that snowballed from that is on him.”

“Yeah,” Romelle absently picked at the grass. She glanced over at him, smiling a little. “So I casually mentioned in the conversation that you’ve been dating Allura since then. Just to rile him.”

Lance took a second to process that, then started laughing. That was such a sneaky little move on Romelle’s part, and it was just so deliciously perfect. Allura probably wouldn’t have agreed if she was there, but Lotor deserved that torture. He held up a hand for a high five, which confused Romelle badly enough that he had to lift her hand for her and show her how to do it.

Movement caught his eye and he looked to his left to see Acxa coming out of the Lorelia, Lotor and Camille in tow. They walked quickly and with purpose, Axca flagging down Adam and James from where he was laying over in the sun. Adam excused himself and left the kids to finish cooking lunch, and James jumped up and wandered over.

Lance scrambled to his feet when he saw Acxa’s face, and even Lotor looked genuinely concerned. He helped Romelle up and they met the others, all of them instinctively forming a tight circle to protect the kids from hearing whatever was going on.

“We have a problem,” Acxa said quietly when they’d gathered. “I got some of the communications equipment working. We still can’t send long range but we can receive, and it’s all over Galra channels that Lotor’s declared war on the Empire.”

“That’s pretty impressive of him, considering he’s been either unconscious or handcuffed for the last week,” Adam noted. “How did he manage that?”

“From what we’re picking up, Honerva showed up at the Kral Zera brazier and announced herself as Lotor’s messenger, declaring war in the name of Altea,” Acxa answered.

“Which means there’s no way Lotor is calling off the dogs at the colony as an enemy of the state,” James frowned. “Why do something like that though? She doesn’t have anywhere near enough Alteans to really wage a war, what is she doing?”

“Divide and conquer,” Camille answered. “Honerva has been manipulating the Galra as Haggar the witch for ten thousand years, and she’ll keep doing so. Nobody knows she’s Altean. But this way, she makes sure Lotor can’t step in and turn that empire against her.”

“So we don’t really have a choice, if we’re going to liberate anybody who’s left on the colony we have to make a jump to Coalition space and gather allies,” Romelle said. “We’ll need the Atlas’ firepower.”

“No, no way!” Lance whispered. “We can’t rely on the Earth military.”

“Well we aren’t going to take down an occupying Galra force with six idiots and eleven kids,” James pointed out. “The Atlas is our best bet.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Lance insisted. “Griffin, do you remember the night Shiro came back to Earth? The night something crashed in the desert and everything went on lock down at the Garrison? They hauled him out of that striker, strapped him to a table, and drugged the hell out of him so they could play Alien Autopsy on him because of his arm.

“What do you think is going to happen to us once we get back?” He pressed. “You have a Galra tech leg. Adam has eye implants and matching brainware. I have magic face tattoos and probably hours of footage of me shooting up the Atlas. Buddy, we’re getting quarantined for weeks before we get cleared to even open our mouths, and the second we mention Lotor’s name we’ll get another month. And that’s if they don’t fire on sight when they spot an Altean vessel that’s wormholed into their territory and _won’t answer their hails_. Maybe all of that was an option before, but we don't have that kind of time now that Lotor can't muster his own backup.”

James fell silent at that, looking a bit green as he realized that he would definitely fall victim to military protocol.

“Declaring war is brazen, even for Honerva,” Camille murmured in the silence that followed. “Its like she believes she’ll have Lotor back soon and wants to position the colony to be her collateral for him doing what she wants.”

“When she doesn’t get him back, she might just destroy it,” Acxa frowned. “By now she’s taken all the gifted children from it, anyone left would be too young to be useful even if they could use alchemy.”

“A lesson in obedience,” Lotor murmured. He looked around the circle, and Lance thought his face held something almost akin to regret. “So no, there is no time to wait for reinforcements. We’ll open a wormhole to friendly space for you, take the shuttle and go home. Camille, Acxa, we’ll leave immediately for the colony. It has some old defenses we may be able to use, better than nothing at least. We’ll do reconnaissance and see if there’s anything we can do to before the order for its destruction is given. Romelle, you may stay or go as you wish.”

“I’ll stay,” Romelle said firmly. “That colony is my home, even if liberating it fails I can’t just do nothing.”

“I’m staying too,” Adam added. “I’m not going to let what happened on Earth happen anywhere else if I can help it.”

Lance looked up sharply at Adam’s decision, fighting back the urge to argue with him in front of everyone. He understood the urge, but he had been held captive for so long. He needed to go home, he needed to recover, not walk into more blatant violence.

“Well, you’re not sending _me_ home to get locked up in quarantine,” James said after a moment. “I guess you’ll just have to put up with me for a little while.”

Lance looked around the circle, feeling sick to his stomach. They were talking about a suicide mission, _literally_ a suicide mission. There was no backup coming, there was nobody to call when things got bad. When, not if. They had two adult humans, four adult Alteans, and eleven Altean children who were gifted but had only been taught just enough alchemy to be useful building and piloting Honerva’s mechs.

Sincline was their only advantage. It was as fast and strong as Voltron and _might_ help turn the tide of the fight, but that was only with a full crew. So far, two of the ships wouldn’t let anyone in and Jade would only power up for Romelle. Even if she remembered her piloting skills she was a cargo pilot, not a fighter pilot.

“This is going to be a disaster,” he groaned, rubbing his face. “We’re all going to die. You all know that, right? That we’re all going to die?”

“If we could just get the long range communications working, we could send an SOS to Keith and Allura,” Romelle suggested. “Yeah, it’s a terrible idea to jump into Coalition airspace right now, but if we could get them to come to us it might be another story.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the parts to fix it,” Acxa answered. Lotor cocked his head to the side as if remembering something.

“We do have the parts.” He turned to Acxa and she looked up at him at the same time.

“The quantum abyss,” they said simultaneously.

“The medical facility is built into the moon,” Acxa told the rest of them. “Since quintessence runners were going to and from, it has a small hangar…with parts to repair ships.”

“Yeah, but how long will it take to get there and back?” James asked.

“The facility is only a few systems away from the colony,” Lotor answered. “If the main group heads to the colony, I can take a side trip along the way to the facility. I can produce some of the addiction therapy to keep on hand, pick up the parts, and meet back up quickly. Time passes at four times the speed in the abyss, even if I’m there for two days it’s only twelve hours out here.”

“I’ll go with you,” Adam volunteered. “I’m an engineer, I can handle collecting and tweaking equipment for the Lorelia while you do your lab work.”

“We may also be able to find help when we get there,” Lotor remembered. “Acxa, is Kuro still at the facility?”

“I…don’t know,” Acxa admitted. “I haven’t been able to get back there since you disappeared. Keith sent the Blade of Marmora to check it but they didn’t find anything…it’s possible Honerva got there and took him along with the remaining patients. It’s also possible he left of his own accord before she ever got there, he was always free to leave. Either way, it’s been about fifteen or sixteen decaphoebs in the abyss, he probably would have left by now if he wasn’t taken.”

“Who’s Kuro?” Camille asked.

“Someone we rescued from Central Command on our way out after Shiro dragged me back,” Lotor answered. “The facility was the only safe place to put him at the time, we had to drop him and get back.”

“Get back to try to murder us, if I remember correctly,” Lance muttered.

Lotor tensed. Lance had about half a second of warning that the calm exterior was finally collapsing before he found himself shoved backward, barely managing to keep his feet as he stumbled.

“Get back to secure the rift gate,” Lotor snarled, shoving him again. Lance tried to get his footing to brace himself, but Lotor kept him off balance, hitting him with hard shoves in the chest every time he almost managed to steady himsef. “Do you remember _that_? Can you remember correctly that you destroyed what countless numbers of my people died for? Gave their lives to secure a future for their children? Does that happen to ring a bell, you loud-mouthed, selfish little brat?”

He gave one final shove, but this time Lance felt a foot kick forward to catch up his own, making him trip and fall back. He hit the grass hard.

“What exactly did you want from me?” Lotor asked, glaring down at him. “Accolades? Should I have _thanked_ you for rendering their sacrifice meaningless? For setting all surviving Alteans back by decades? Those people deserved every justice I could give them that day, and I still would not feel guilty up to this moment if I’d managed to kill you then.”

Camille and Acxa reached them, touching Lotor’s arms lightly in preparation to pull him back if they had to. But they didn’t, he spun around and stalked away, across the sunlit field to disappear into the Lorelia.

Lance remained where he sat and watched him go, in shock. Even sitting in the shuttle listening to Acxa explain to Romelle that early Alteans had voluntarily died to build the rift gate, he hadn’t connected that sacrifice to anything he and the other Paladins had done that day. Lance looked up when Camille moved to walk away, leaving Acxa still standing by him. She looked pained.

“He tried to explain,” she said softly. “He tried to reason with you, he wouldn’t let us fight back even after Allura fired on us. She wouldn’t listen. He was on the edge of a breakdown and trying to keep the peace, but none of you would listen. You just kept pushing until he broke.”

Acxa offered him a hand to help him up. Lance took it, feeling out of sorts and almost lightheaded as he stood. It wasn’t a gentle or gradual shift of of view, the truth of the matter was like a physical blow.

“You have to understand…Lotor spent ten thousand years fighting Zarkon and Haggar any way he could,” she murmured. “All Allura did for Altea was sleep that time away safe and sound and wake up just in time to be offered a share of the glory…and then rip her people’s progress to shreds instead.”

She turned back to the group, where Romelle was looking painfully guilty and James was looking partially confused since he’d never been given that whole story. Adam was standing closer, as if he’d been moving to step between Lotor and Lance, but his expression was unreadable.

“The colony planet has some defenses,” Acxa changed the subject, unwilling to think about the subject further. “When it was first founded, everyone lived underground in a bunker-style base. They moved to the surface as their numbers grew, and once they’d been there for a while without being discovered and knew it was safe. The bunker is old, it was built by the original colonists and hasn’t seen action in almost eight thousand years. The only reason I even know about it is because part of the regular security rounds include checking the bunker hatches to make sure they’re secure so no kids wander in and get lost.”

“What kind of defenses are we talking about?” Adam asked, resting a hand on Lance’s shoulder as they returned to the circle.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” Acxa admitted. “Altean weapons from thousands of years ago are different from weapons we could make now. But the planet was chosen to be defensible and defenses were definitely built in, Lotor will have the details.”

“Hey!” Ariella came running over, hugging one of Romelle’s arms and smiling at everyone, blissfully unaware of the drama going on. “Lunch is done!”

“We’ll be right over,” Adam assured her softly, resting a hand lightly on top of her head. “Why don’t you run into the ship and let Tiselle and Farla know to get the others out here?”

Ariella skipped off, and Adam waited for her to disappear into the ship.

“Acxa, you and I will have a Grown Up meeting to talk to him this afternoon and figure out all the details. As it stands, he and I will go to the medical facility and I’ll try to find parts to fix the outgoing comms system. We’ll see if this friend of yours is there, and once this quintessence addiction therapy is put together we’ll come meet you. In the meantime, you all will head to this bunker and lay low until we get there.”

“Why does she get to be part of the Grown Up meeting and I don’t?” James asked, crossing his arms and raising an eyebrow.

“Because I’m limiting it to three people and she’s got like a year on you,” Adam answered.

“I’m twenty-seven,” Acxa clarified.

“She’s got like six years on you,” Adam corrected, turning away from James to look Acxa up and down. “Twenty-seven? Really? Okay, you _are_ hot.”

Acxa rolled her eyes and pushed past him to go join the others at the fire. Adam turned to Romelle.

“So are you going to tell me you’re actually thirty?”

It was Romelle’s turn to roll her eyes and go over to the fire. James shook his head and followed suit, leaving Lance and Adam alone. Adam lightly nudged Lance with his elbow, urging him to come eat, and he gave in and followed.

It was a quiet affair on Lance’s part. He sat out at the edge of the group and only ate a little, trying to smile when the kids offered him some of the berries for dessert. Lotor didn’t come back outside, but the moods of the others gradually lightened. Lance’s, however, only grew darker as the minutes wore on.

He excused himself as soon as it wasn’t impolite to do so, with the excuse of going to check on the pelt that was hanging just within the treeline. When he was out of view he pulled himself up to sit on one of the lower hanging branches, playing that fateful day over in his head. A lot of the details were foggy, not because of his memory but because he had been fighting for his life and that was what had mattered.

Lance never even heard the rustle of leaves or the sound of footsteps. One moment he was alone and the next Adam was standing at his knee, appearing like a shark lunging up out of the water unannounced.

“Jesus,” Lance breathed, patting himself on the chest as his heart fluttered in startlement. “Look, I know you’ve been doing things a certain way for a year, but can you stop _stalking_ me? That’s the third time in two days you’ve just appeared ambush-style.”

Adam pulled himself up to sit next to Lance, closer to the tree’s trunk so he didn’t put too much pressure on the branch.

“You should stop thinking about it,” he advised.

“And how am I supposed to do that?” Lance asked darkly. “Because Lotor’s right. I never liked him because Allura fell in love with him. I’d had feelings for her for so long, I was always trying to get her to give me a chance, and she’d barely look at me. Then he swept in, and because he was part Altean and a prince he was exactly what she wanted. And I guess she was kind of right about me, because a little part of me was glad when he turned on us. There was always this little “I told you so” in the back of my mind, and I guess if you really do love someone you don’t think like that.”

“Love is just as messy as war,” Adam answered. “Sometimes it’s worse. War wounds you can at least sew up and bandage, love wounds just bleed. Heartbreak is just as real as a bullet hole, Lance, and when we’re hurt we don’t always act our best. No human being is perfect, and being in the middle of fighting for your life doesn’t exactly help a person think straight. You are not at fault for Lotor failing to be fully open about his intentions.”

“So you do remember his name,” Lance smiled a little.

“I have a great memory, I just also know when somebody looks like they need to be taken down a few pegs,” Adam returned the smile faintly. “Look…in the end, survival drives us. Sometimes we’re put in situations where we have to make decisions to keep ourselves alive, and we don’t have all the information. Waiting too long for the truth rarely works in our favor, sometimes we need to act and we need to do it quickly. All of our choices eventually come down to trying to stay alive, and you _cannot_ be faulted for that. It sounds to me like Lotor made the conscious decision to not share the full truth with you, and you could only act on what you knew.”

“But I could have tried harder,” Lance protested. “Keith was gone, Shiro was gone…if either one of them had been there, I’d have no problem opening my mouth and trying to rein them in. But because it was Allura and it was Lotor on the other side, I barely tried at all. I should’ve stepped in, I should’ve tried to get some kind of explanation.”

“Why would you?”

“Huh?”

“Why would you try to get an explanation?” Adam prompted. “Were you close friends?”

“No, not exactly. Not really. Not at all, I guess,” Lance admitted.

“It’s not your job to put your safety and life at risk because someone else _might_ have secrets,” Adam insisted. “When what you know tells you that somebody is a bad guy, and it’s either you or the bad guy, you don’t stop to think that maybe the bad guy is actually a good guy. You don’t let down your guard because it _might_ be the right thing to do. Normal dead people are dead, Lance. Do you know what a martyr is?”

“What?”

“Still dead, just with a stupid plaque somewhere,” Adam said. “Their lives are still over, their story is still done. It doesn’t mean jack shit that people remember you died because you believed in doing the right thing, you’re still a fucking corpse.”

“You would really hate the memorial wall at the Garrison,” Lance snorted. “Your plaque even has your picture.”

He meant to make Adam smile a little, but it didn’t have the intended affect. Rather than look even the slightest bit amused he got a little bit cold. Not necessarily toward Lance himself, but toward the situation.

“I’m so glad they put all of their effort into printing my face on a piece of metal. I’d hate to see them dedicating a few hours of the last six months to look at the empty plane in the middle of the desert and realize there’s no body instead.”

Lance didn’t really know what to say to that, because it was absolutely true. He and the others had taken the Garrison’s word for it that Adam was dead, they had assumed there was proof of the fact. They had been given no ‘might’ or ‘maybe’ to think otherwise, and honestly that made Lance a little bit angry. Because even if the Garrison couldn’t have tracked Adam down _he_ would have. And he knew Shiro would have helped him.

Adam looked over at him and softened, finally smiling a little.

“I’m sorry. It’s not your job to put up with me being bitter, either. I’m free now, that’s what matters.”

Lance carefully shifted on the branch to slide over closer, the angle of the branch leaving him leaning heavily against Adam. The older pilot put an arm around him and Lance let his head rest on Adam’s shoulder.

“I’m also glad you did what you had to do to stay alive,” Adam added. “I don’t care about Lotor’s feelings. His stupid rift gate got put back together by his mommy, so we know it could’ve been fixed. He would’ve known it too if he hadn’t had a fit and started a fight that got him dumped in the quintessence field.”

“Yeah, that’s the next thing on our list of ridiculous longshots,” Lance groaned. “If we survive retaking the colony, next we have to retake the rift gate. One thing at a time, I guess.”

They fell quiet, thinking their own thoughts. Lance found his drifting back to Adam, and how different he was while still being very much the same. He welcomed being touched by pretty much anyone, whether it was Lance or the younger kids or even James or Acxa touching his shoulder for his attention, which was normal for Adam, but he was much more emotionally closed off. Especially on one particular subject.

“When we were sending messages home with Sam Holt to our families, I helped Shiro set up the camera,” Lance said quietly. “I wasn’t allowed in the room, so I didn’t hear what he said. Was it for you?”

Adam didn’t answer right away. For a moment Lance thought he might have dozed off, then he shrugged gently.

“I never got any message. It might have gotten confiscated from Sam with his other things.”

He was avoiding. For some reason he did not want to talk about Shiro, and to Lance that was the weirdest change Adam could have gone through.

“He’ll probably be so relieved when you come home,” Lance tried. “He was devastated when he thought you were dead. He goes down to the memorial wall sometimes—”

“Please stop.”

Lance lifted his head a little to look at Adam’s face. He looked so tired these last few days, dark circles under his eyes and his complexion a bit pale. He had picked up the slack and taken up the leadership role without hesitation, and he had just been going so non-stop it was easy to forget he hadn’t really been part of the war and was out of his depth with most of what was going on.

“I don’t want to talk about him, all right?” Adam wasn’t mean about it, but the seriousness on his face still made Lance wince internally. “It’s been six years since I’ve seen him. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen Earth. And I’m still out here, with a list of things to try to survive that just keeps getting longer, instead of on my way back. I can’t stop and think about home, Lance. I _can’t_. I can’t spend time and energy reminiscing about a planet halfway across the universe instead of focusing on trying to stay alive here and now.”

“Okay. Sorry.” Lance didn’t really understand it, but he respected it. “I guess I forget not everybody’s like me. I focus better when I think about what’s waiting at home, you know? It reminds me that I’m not just out here doing all this for no reason. Every Galra fleet and faction base I can bring down makes everyone back on Earth safer. Every gifted Altean we pull out of Honerva’s hands takes away one more weapon, one more mech pilot. It’s one more day the other Paladins may not have to risk their lives.”

He let out a breath, absently looking at the remains of the animal carcass still hanging a little ways away in the tree. They’d used most of it, and would probably take the hide and horns with them. The latter might make a nice hilt for a knife.

“What’s up with you and Keith?” Lance blurted out before he could stop himself, his wandering brain making that connection at random. “I know why I didn’t get along with him, but you never seemed to like him. And even when I bring him up now you’re not happy.”

“Nothing, mostly,” Lance felt Adam’s shoulder shrug a bit under his head. “There’s just something about him that doesn’t feel right. Something off about him. Like he’s something else wrapped up in a human skin, like you see in horror movies. I was never really scared of him or anything, he just made me irrationally angry simply by being there.”

“Okay, not an entirely weird reaction to Keith in general when he was younger,” Lance grinned a little. “I know that feeling.”

“We ignored each other while he was at the Garrison, the only interaction we had was when I graded his work. And that was fine, Takashi got the point and kept us separate unless necessary. But after Kerberos, when everyone thought Takashi was dead, I guess we both snapped a little. We got…territorial over it. Neither one of us really liked the way the other was handling it.

“That’s why Keith got kicked out of the Garrison,” Adam admitted. “He pulled a knife on me after the Kerberos memorial.”

“Wait, he did what?” Lance sat up, looking up at Adam with disbelief. He’d always known Keith was tossed out for having discipline issues, but nobody had ever known the details of his expulsion. Adam had certainly never mentioned it before.

“We had some words outside of the auditorium,” Adam answered. “I didn’t want to be there, but I’d been MIA for a few days and Iverson required me to show up. I couldn’t handle it, I was only there for a little bit when I had to leave. Kogane caught me outside and started coming at me for being so disrespectful.

“I was barely holding it together, and I guess a switch just finally flipped. I knew I should keep my mouth shut, I was the adult. I knew he was grieving, I knew he wouldn’t say any of the things he did under normal circumstances. But it was Kogane, and there was nobody there to separate us, and I just…verbally clawed the shit out of him. I said everything I could think of to hurt him as much as I possibly could, some of it true and some of it not.

“He lost it, it turned into a physical altercation. I was at least sane enough at the time to be trying not to hurt him, but he pulled that stupid knife of his on me as other people were coming out of the auditorium. A superior officer disarmed him, there was no way to go our separate ways and pretend it hadn’t happened. He got kicked out.”

Lance tried to imagine that altercation going down, and to be honest it was all too easy. He’d never seen Adam lose it, but from the way he sometimes handled adults that annoyed him Lance could picture it. It was easy enough to believe Keith would freak out and pull his knife.

“So I just don’t like him,” Adam finished, shrugging it off. “I don’t like how he makes me feel, or that he can get to me just by being there. And I _don’t_ like that when he can’t think of anything to say he resorts to violence. So when I tell you to be careful of him, I mean be careful.”

“He’s not like he was back at the Garrison,” Lance answered, pulling the folded-up paper from where he had it tucked safely under his breastplate and turning it over in his hands wistfully. “For one thing, I think I know why he gives you that weird vibe…he’s half Galra. We found that out while we were out in space.”

“Oh, that makes it that much better.”

Okay, maybe not the best information to try and use on Keith’s behalf, considering that Adam had just spent so much time being tortured by the Galra.

“No, he’s not like that,” Lance insisted. “Look, there are good Galra out there. People who have spent their whole lives fighting the empire to try and bring peace, people who died trying to bring an end to the military rule. The Blade of Marmora risked everything to help us liberate planet after planet, only to end up with most of them hunted down and killed for it. Keith’s mother is a Blade, and her uncle Kolivan leads it. They’re trying to rebuild to keep up the fight, and Keith is helping. He’s different now that Shiro’s back and he’s found his mom. He has things to fight _for_ instead of just a universe to fight against.”

He unfolded the drawing, startling himself as something small fell out of the folds. Adam had to grab him to keep him from falling off the branch as he lunged to grab it before it got lost in the grass. He held it in his open palm, the little metal disc he’d put there for safekeeping.

“Tracker,” Lance realized. “Tracker! Keith put this on me last time I saw him, it’s the same kind of tracker he used to follow Lotor!”

He fiddled with the little disc until he found the power button. For a second nothing happened, then the little red light started to blink.

“We’ll put this on the Lorelia!” Lance said excitedly. Finally, they had some kind of relatively good news. “Keith will follow it, and if you can’t get the comms fixed he’ll be able to call for backup when he finds us!”

“You really think he’s going to follow that?” Adam asked critically. “With no other information?”

“It’s Keith, so definitely,” Lance grinned. “And the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s getting into means he’ll bring backup. He knows I was going back for Romelle and those kids and he knows Honerva’s involved, he’ll probably bring Shiro and the Atlas.”

Adam frowned, taking the tracker from Lance. He turned it over a few times, inspecting it with an engineer’s eye, before handing it back.

“Would he really bring everyone blindly, without knowing if it was safe?” He asked.

“I know that sounds kind of dumb,” Lance admitted. “But it’s kind of what we do. You have to see the Lions to understand, they’re some of the strongest weapons in the known universe. We used to have the Castle of Lions as our docking station and home base, but the Atlas plays that part now. So yeah, everyone would come. It’s the way we’ve been doing it since the beginning, and its worked so far.”

Adam didn’t look happy or unhappy about it. Lance supposed he shouldn’t have expected any kind of anticipation out of him, especially since he’d just clearly stated he had no interest in thinking about his past right now, but he couldn’t help it. He just inherently wanted to see peoples’ faces light up, to know they still had hope. Especially Adam, who always seemed to be there when he needed him.

Even when least expected, like light years away from Earth in the middle of nowhere on a Galra outpost when he was considered dead.

Lance tucked the tracker back in his breastplate and looked down at the sketch, the messy drawing of himself and the Red Lion. Keith had changed a lot, he’d meant it when he said it, he just hoped Adam saw that.

He folded the sketch back up and rested his head on Adam’s shoulder again, listening to the kids laughing in the distance as they broke down their little camp and prepared to head into war.

* * * * * * * * * *

 _ **Years ago**_ :

Lance sat on the curb outside the gas station, arms crossed on his knees, watching a group of ants slowly dismantle a corn chip. It was nearly midnight but the air was warm, the late September heat still lingering on the surrounding desert. The night manager of the gas station, a nice man whose name Lance had learned was Jack, came out to check on him again. Lance assured him his ride was on the way, and he was left alone again.

He hated that Adam was interrupting his much-needed time off to come running for him. That had been the point of leaving while he was away, so Lance wouldn’t be an inconvenience to yet another person. He should have been back home before his mentor even returned to the Garrison to find him gone, where his mother could find him a normal, boring high school to enroll him. Where he belonged.

He wasn’t meant to be a fighter pilot, that was the hard truth. He wanted it, sure, but it wasn’t really meant to be. That was why he’d initially been put into cargo class, because he just wasn’t good enough. Somewhere along the way he’d gotten distracted, he’d stopped performing well, and nobody wanted or needed a fighter pilot who couldn’t concentrate on his mission.

Keith Kogane being expelled from the Garrison last week had been a small miracle. It was the first few weeks of the school year and Lance’s flight scores from last year still left him ranked the highest in the cargo class, he had been moved into the open spot. He’d been so ready to show them all what he could do, so confident he could prove himself.

But all he’d done was crash and burn. Literally, on his first day.

He felt like he’d never get rid of the shame. Iverson had called him out at the beginning of the class, specifically challenged his right to be there, if ever there was a time to shine and prove somebody wrong it had been then. But instead he’d let himself be shaken, he’d buckled under the pressure and proved the Commander completely correct.

Headlights washed over him as a vehicle pulled into the gas station, a familiar Jeep parking near the curb. He sighed and stood up, grabbing his backpack from where it was leaning against the building.

“Lance?” Adam’s voice sounded a bit off as he got out of the Jeep and came around it, laced with something akin to panic as the older pilot grabbed him and pulled him into a tight hug. “Oh thank God. I can’t believe you _hitchhiked_ across the fucking desert, I’m going to strangle you to death.”

“It wasn’t so bad, the guy was nice!” Lance protested, returning the hug. Okay, so maybe sitting alone at a dark gas station in the middle of nowhere at night was a little bit scary.

“Yeah, until he asks you if his napkin smells like chloroform and then the next thing you know you wake up to being tied up and thrown in a trunk,” Adam insisted. He let go and took a step back, and Lance did a double take.

“What the hell happened to _you_?”

Adam looked like he’d been through the ringer. He was covered in dust and dirt, scraped and bruised all over and spotted with dried blood in places. His hair was all over the place, there were circles under his eyes, and in general he was just a very sad looking mess. It was the most un-Adam-like Lance had ever seen him.

“Rock climbing happened,” he answered, taking Lance’s backpack and tossing it into the back of the Jeep. “Come on, there’s a diner a few miles back and I desperately need coffee before we head back to the Garrison.”

Adam was exhausted, Lance could see that. He guiltily climbed into the passenger seat and stayed quiet for the short ride down the road, occasionally stealing glances at the older pilot in the dark. There were no street lights but the night was clear, and there was enough star and moonlight to see him by.

He looked so sad. That was why he’d been out in the cliffs after all, to try and clear his head after the last week. The constant onslaught of news stations flashing the faces of the Kerberos crew, the incessant claims that the three deaths had been caused by the pilot’s mistakes. On his way past Adam’s classroom between classes four days ago Lance had seen another teacher—a supposedly reasonable, intelligent adult—lean in and ask him jokingly how it felt to get rid of a pesky ex and become the Garrison’s new top pilot all in one day.

Adam was taking it all in stride, keeping a low profile and remaining carefully stoic in public, but Lance knew it was taking a toll.

The diner was fairly quiet when they arrived, only a few booths holding long-distance truck drivers who had stopped for a meal and some rest on their routes. They took a corner booth and Adam immediately ordered a coffee and an omelet without even looking at the menu being offered. Lance didn’t want to make anyone wait on him, so he just ordered a BLT and a soda.

“So, pray tell, what in all seven layers of hell went through your skull that made you think running way from the Garrison was a good idea?” Adam asked once the waitress left.

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to be there anymore,” Lance answered, absently tearing up one of the cheap paper napkins. “Nobody remembers what I do right, they only remember the mistakes. Iverson doesn’t want me in fighter class, he’s not subtle about it, and I can’t hack it even if he did.”

“Where is this even coming from?” Adam pressed, leaning his elbows on the table and rubbing his temples. “Your flight scores are fine, your grades are fine, you mess up a little bit now and then but everyone does, that’s why you’re in school. To learn.”

“Iverson says the only reason I’m even in fighter class is because Keith Kogane got expelled,” Lance answered dully. “And he’s right. I couldn’t make it on my own, I had to wait for somebody better to leave an opening they had to fill.”

Adam let out a deep breath through his nose, the way he did when he was irritated. Lance didn’t get the feeling he was irritated with him though. Maybe with Iverson…Adam wasn’t the most conventional of soldiers on the base, and though it was never done in front of students Lance knew he was often disciplined for his own transgressions. He was quiet, stirring his coffee in a slow, tired way, his chin resting on one hand.

“On Monday, I’m being put back on the active pilot register to lead Takashi’s unit,” he said finally, after the waitress had brought Lance’s soda and left again. “They had an officer doing it temporarily, but now that he…won’t be coming back, they want a more permanent arrangement.”

“That’s your old unit, right?” Lance asked.

“Yeah, I requested to be made a backup pilot for another unit after Takashi and I got involved, I didn’t want there to be any stupid scandals or rumors,” Adam answered. “Plus, I wanted to finish my college coursework so I could teach. I’ll be taking Takashi’s plane and his call sign.”

“The other guys push that on you?” Lance asked, glancing up from stirring his soda. “I’m sorry.”

Call signs weren’t chosen by the pilot, they were voted on by his or her unit. It was a rite of passage and ultimately of politics, what name you got often reflected what your peers thought of you. There was a lot of bribery and begging behind the scenes before call signs were handed out, to try and avoid getting stuck with something embarrassing or stupid.

Sometimes signs were retired when a respected pilot passed away. Sometimes they were inherited by people close to them. Adam’s unit probably thought they were giving him some kind of honor by giving him Shiro’s sign, Lance doubted they would have done it if they knew how much it would hurt him. And Adam wasn’t the type of person who liked to let other people know when he was hurt.

“The fact is, it’s never pleasant to live in someone else’s shadow,” Adam said. “Anytime you come after someone great, you’re always going to have higher expectations dropped on you. You’re always going to be compared. No it’s not right and no it’s not fair, it just is. I understand what you’re up against, better than a lot of people. So what I’m about to tell you isn’t just some optimistic bullshit spewed by those weird morning people who always wake up glad to be alive for some reason.”

He paused as the waitress arrived to set their plates down. She was a smart woman and immediately grabbed the coffee pot from behind the counter, refilling Adam’s nearly empty mug before leaving them alone again.

“Confidential information I’m not supposed to be sharing with you, because fuck responsibility,” Adam continued tiredly. “Your flight score was…what? 4.82, I think?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, 4.82. The highest was Kogane, he had a 5.00 score. Big shock. Of the other nine scores, one had a 4.91, one had a 4.86, three had a 4.84, and four had a 4.83. The highest score after you was a 3.68. The only reason you didn’t make fighter class was because there were only ten spots and there were eleven top scorers.

“And even then, the final spot was a toss up between you and Kogane…his score was higher than yours, but he was a terrible fucking soldier, Lance. He can fly a plane, yeah, but he can’t take orders, he can’t control himself, and he can’t communicate well with other people. Kogane got that spot conditionally, because it was the only thing at the Garrison he could do. You were put on reserve because the fighter pilot track is rigorous and there are always one or two who drop out, and they knew you’d excel at other things until a spot opened up. You didn’t get in on some quota they had to fill.”

“Well it sure doesn’t feel like I got in on skill,” Lance insisted. “You’d be embarrassed to be my flight instructor if you saw how bad I did today, Adam. I wrecked in three simulator flights in a row.”

“So what?” Adam asked. “It’s a simulator, it’s not like you’ve crashed an actual plane and cost them money. You’re a _student_ , Lance, it’s our job to teach you how to not wreck. I’d be shocked if you didn’t spend most of the day crashing, you spent the last year learning the cargo protocols and this was your first day in fighter. They’re separate classes for a reason…they’re very different.”

Adam had only eaten two small bites of his food, but he pushed it away with disinterest. Lance had noticed he had a weird habit of eating a big meal every couple of days and just picking at things the rest of the time, probably because he was always so caffeinated his body didn’t know how eating worked anymore. It was amazing his yearly physical didn’t come back saying he wasn’t fit enough to fly because his entire nervous system had dissolved.

“And Iverson,” Adam added, rolling his eyes so hard Lance wondered if he’d seen his own brain, “Iverson…is an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good man even though he probably doesn’t seem like it to you. He’s just got a code-switching problem. You have to remember, he’s used to spending a lot of time yelling at me and my merry little generation of absolute fucking imbeciles, he’s not a _teacher_.

“Me taking off today for a long weekend was a decision he and I made at the last minute, and he wasn’t ready to cover a class. When you’re used to screaming at adults who act like children it’s hard to switch to properly speaking to actual children. Him telling you the only reason you’re there is because Kogane left? I’m pretty sure he thought he was being encouraging. He was trying to challenge you and make you step up, but he’s used to professional combat pilots…he’s not used to inexperienced teenagers who might freak out and lock up.”

Lance had finished his sandwich, so he grabbed his fork and started on the omelet Adam obviously wasn’t interested in. He had gotten so sick to his stomach after the morning’s flight class he hadn’t eaten anything all day, and now he was feeling it. When he didn’t answer, Adam reached across the table to tap his forehead with his coffee spoon for attention.

“We’re going back to the Garrison after this,” Adam informed him. “We’re going to spend the weekend one-on-one with the simulator, and I’m going to get you up to speed with the other fighter class pilots. Monday you’re going to go to class, and you’re going to show them you can keep up just fine. And then we’re going to forget this lapse in judgement ever even happened, because Lance McClain isn’t a quitter.”

Lance smiled a little and nodded as Adam waved the waitress over to refill his mug again. From the looks of him, being in the cliffs was doing Adam no favors whatsoever, and running away obviously wasn’t helping Lance. Maybe the change of plans would them both some good.

* * * * * * * * *

 _ **Current day**_ :

Adam opened his eyes and listened to the quiet hum of the Lorelia’s engines, filling the room with their steady purr. He was alone in the engine room, which was exactly the reason he’d chosen there to sleep. There were small spaces he could curl up in and feel secure, away from the discomfort of having people around him while he was unconscious.

He stretched a little and rolled off the edge of the low catwalk, hanging off it for a few seconds before letting himself drop the last four inches to the floor, and went to lean against the doorway and listen. There was no one.

Honerva had reached out to him again, and he’d upheld his part of the bargain to give her coordinates. The Lorelia was currently en route to the colony, but the direction they were traveling in was still basically the same. Which was good, his endgame was still to get at least Lance, James, and Romelle into safe hands. That meant keeping Honerva from actively following them for a few more days.

Whether the colony was liberated or not, he was going to do what he had to do to keep her at bay. Adam had no confidence that the Atlas or these Lions could fight the firepower Honerva had, even if she didn’t have enough yet to wage an entire war. He just needed to give her what she wanted and keep her happy long enough for them to realize that and get the hell to safety.

Everything was quiet. James and Lance were in the Sincline with Romelle, in case they were intercepted and she needed help with fighting. Adam knew no such thing would happen but he didn’t discourage them, it meant fewer people he had to deal with.

He passed through the ship with no incident, running into barely anyone at all. Most of the younger kids were asleep, sharing bunks, and the older Alteans slept in shifts. Lotor and Acxa were likely taking turns sleeping and supervising the bridge, and the docking bay was empty when he arrived.

Adam made his way to the far side of the docking bay, to the wall where the little blinking disc had been stuck. He pulled it down and returned to the engine room without incident.

Here was where they also stored tools, small parts, and any number of useful items. Adam picked through what was available, collecting the things he needed before climbing back up to the catwalk where he wouldn’t be bothered while he worked.

The tracker was very basic, which wasn’t surprising. They all worked the same way, they were easy enough to build from scratch if one knew what they were doing, it was the signal that was unique. The signal itself was what the receiving equipment identified, and what the person tracking followed. Adam turned on the frequency reader from his slapdash tool kit and did a few adjustments, cloning the signal.

From there he spent a few hours working on it, careful to make only subtle changes. Occasionally he went too far and the signal didn’t match enough, which was not what he wanted. He wanted it to be picked up by the same equipment that would read Lance’s tracker. It was the kind of thing that took a musician’s ear, and it had been so very long since Adam had even remembered music existed.

It was about six hours before he finished and was lying back down to go back to sleep. Six hours to make a full copy of the tracker, with his own unique signal that differed just slightly. Just enough for the human ear to pick up and recognize the notes, notes that only a specific person would likely hear any meaning behind.

Traps for specific targets, after all, worked best with very specific bait.


	12. Chapter 12

One good thing about being tall was the ability to walk faster than others without looking specifically like he was in a hurry. Not that Curtis wasn’t in a hurry, he very much was, he just didn’t want anybody to notice. And when Curtis didn’t want people to notice things, they didn’t.

He had “plain” down to an art form, from his haircut to his mannerisms to the way he spoke. Nothing stood out, nothing raised alarms, and often it was very hard for people to remember that something they had heard had come from the mouth of Curtis Dechesne.

That was how intelligence special forces worked. They influenced things, changed things, spread things, made things disappear. And they did it without being remembered.

The people milling in the Garrison halls barely cast the Lieutenant Commander a glance. Height played a part in this as well, people generally didn’t want to be caught staring and they unconsciously knew that tilting their head up would call attention to them so they didn’t. But more importantly, his stripes and insignia told everyone he passed that he had the authority to be here.

Curtis counted his steps as he walked, blue eyes flicking to the surveillance camera at the end of the hall with carefully schooled indifference. He used his steps to time its movement, leaning into an open doorway to greet an unfamiliar secretary just when its field of vision would have picked him up, disappearing from its view. He inquired about the officer he worked for, knowing full well she wasn’t currently in her office, until it was safe to step back out into the hall.

The camera moved to point down the next hall as Curtis reached the corner. He paused, pulled out his phone. Pretended to read a message. Still counting the seconds he leaned back against the wall, under the camera, pretending to respond. The camera pointed the way he’d come, Curtis went around the corner. He reached the secure communications room and swiped an ID card that wasn’t his, stepping inside and closing the door as the camera swept back toward him.

Point A to Point B with no sign he was here, and even the secretary down the hall wouldn’t remember specifically who he had spoken to.

Curtis carefully typed in three quick commands on the lock pad just inside the comm room door. His fingertips, painted with latex and printless, left no indication of who was entering Admiral Miller’s top level override as the door lock was rendered unopenable from the outside.

He crossed the empty room to the main console, dropping down to the floor and stretching out underneath to reach up and pull the maintenance cover off the inner computer. Humming softly to himself he took the small tool kit out of his pocket and unrolled it, and got to work.

It took about fifteen minutes to install the small motherboard, and his watch let out a chirp just as he was finishing. Five minutes to close everything up and get back out.

Curtis returned the computer’s inner workings, hiding the added board from the eyes of the regular techs, and closed up the cover. He tucked his tools back away and rose, booting up the console with Admiral Miller’s access code. As it came to life, he removed the small USB flash drive that was tucked invisibly into the side of his watch. The warning for two minutes sounded as he plugged it in. Curtis touched the small communicator tucked behind his Lt. Commander insignia.

“All yours, Sam.”

The screen went black, then flashed orange. Codes and commands flew by as the virus uploaded, and the warning beep for two minutes remaining sounded. It took about forty-five seconds, then the screen went black again before the regular boot sequence showed. Curtis waited for it to finish then shut the computer down and removed the lock code from the door.

Thirty seconds left. He carefully looked out into the hallway to check the position of the camera. It was pointing right at him, he had to wait for it to turn before he could step out. The door closed behind him and he walked quickly to the corner, pretending to be surprised as Admiral Miller appeared.

“Sir,” he greeted, moving into the space under the security camera to get out of the way, standing up straight and saluting.

Miller barely noticed him, nor did the two officers with him. They went down the hall and Admiral Miller used his code to open the communications room for them.

Curtis folded his hands behind his back and headed down the hall. Not so fast that he would be noticed, but very much in a hurry. Behind him, the camera moved in his direction just after he disappeared through the double doors at the end of the hall, leaving no trace that he’d been there.

He struck out for the Atlas hangar, smiling pleasantly at or greeting those he passed. Perfectly normal, perfectly forgettable. Nobody really noticed him until he entered the hangar, where the Atlas crew was preparing to board for a ‘training exercise’ that would have them ready if Captain Shirogane called for them.

“Any problems?” Sam Holt asked, falling into step beside him as he approached the ship.

“No,” Curtis chirped. “But then, as of right now we’ve only committed a handful of felonies. The day might go downhill once we punch it up to treason, but go big or go home. Are we ready?”

“We’re ready,” Sam nodded.

“I hope they take into account that I have narrow hips when they order my prison uniform,” Curtis mused as they boarded the ship and stepped into the elevator. “People always want to size me by height, you know? But I’m willowy.”

“Look on the bright side,” Sam advised, looking down at their uniforms. The elevator reached the engine room level and he stepped out. “At least you and I already know we look fabulous in orange.”

“Yeah, but Sam, you and I are distinguished gentlemen,” Curtis grinned as the doors began to close again. “We look fabulous in anything.”

Coran was on the bridge when Curtis entered. He already knew Veronica and Captain Shirogane were gone, and Lieutenant Dane was elsewhere with Vice Admiral Iverson. He locked the entrance against unauthorized entry and moved to sit at his console. Putting on his headset, he connected the comms to Iverson’s secured line. The older soldier’s face came up on the Atlas’ viewscreen, as did Sam’s on the line from Engineering.

“Sir, Coran,” Curtis nodded to both men. “Admiral Miller is in his weekly conference and everything is ready to go. Patching in Captain Shirogane.”

He put out a hail to the Black Lion, and within a few minutes Lieutenant Kogane’s face appeared on the comm screen.

“Keith here,” he greeted, blinking when he found himself looking at the Atlas officers. “What’s going on?”

“Keith, we need to get Shiro in on a call,” Coran answered. “And it’s a bit important, so quickly please.”

“Yeah, sure. Hold on.”

He disappeared from view. A moment later Captain Shirogane settled into the pilot seat, taking one look at everyone who was patched in and frowning.

“We’re ready?” He asked.

“Ready, sir,” Curtis nodded.

“All right.” Captain Shirogane took a deep, steadying breath and sat back in the seat. “On your order, Vice Admiral.”

“Sam, Coran,” Iverson said gruffly. “Fire away.”

Coran began entering commands on his console, and on the viewscreen so did Sam. Curtis moved over to the Captain’s console and booted it up, monitoring what was going on with the multiple screens there and feeding that information forward to the Black Lion.

Nothing especially dramatic happened there at the Garrison, but that didn’t mean nothing was happening. Up in space, the repaired zaiforge cannon was booting up, beginning to draw enough power from its six balmera crystals to come online. It was a one-shot wonder since it would drain those crystals fast, but it was meant to be more of a deterrent than anything.

Meanwhile, commands being routed through Admiral Miller’s console, using his authorization codes, were launching a network of satellites from Garrison outposts all over the planet. The synchronized satellites were clearly visible and completely unauthorized, and Curtis heard the chatter start within a few minutes.

“Breaking news reports in Morocco, France, China, and India,” he announced to his superiors. “Miller is on an international call, which means he’ll be clued in within two minutes.”

Curtis checked his watch. Right on time, the comm unit lit up with an incoming call from Miller’s console in the communications room. Leaving visuals off, Curtis picked up the line.

“IGF Atlas, how may I direct your call?”

“Where’s Captain Shirogane?” Miller barked.

“Hold please,” Curtis requested. He disconnected the call. Within thirty seconds it was ringing again. “IGF Atlas, how may I direct your call?”

“This is Admiral Miller, get me Shirogane or Iverson immediately!”

“Hold please,” Curtis said politely. He disconnected the call again, noting another line lighting up. “Captain Shirogane, Vice Admiral Iverson, a call from the Secretary of Defense is coming in to Miller’s line.”

“Route it to me, please,” Iverson requested. Curtis did as asked, boredly picking up a third call from the communications room.

“IGF Atlas, how may I direct your—”

“DO NOT PUT ME ON HOLD!” Miller screamed in his ear. “I want to know what’s going on, and I want to know right—”

“Hold please,” Curtis answered, disconnecting the call.

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Iverson was saying gravely. “We picked up the satellites launching a few minutes ago. Our computer analysts have traced the launch commands back to Admiral Miller’s access codes, but we’re not sure of anything else yet. He’s currently on an international conference call…I don’t want to think ill of the Admiral, sir, but he’s the only one with the authority to coordinate something like this behind the government’s back.”

Miller’s incoming line began to hail again. Curtis picked it up.

“Now you listen to me,” Admiral Miller hissed before he could say anything. “I want to kno—”

“Thank you for contacting the Galaxy Garrison, New Mexico,” Curtis said smoothly. “Please be aware that this call may be monitored for quality control purposes. Your feedback is important to us, please stay on the line and the next available operator will be with you shortly. Your current wait time is less than five minutes.”

He disconnected the line.

The line rang again less than five seconds later. This time Curtis’ comms alert lit up green, indicating that Miller was now trying to call somewhere other than the Atlas, only to have his line rerouted directly to the bridge.

Without bothering to look up from patching in news feeds for Captain Shirogane and Iverson, Curtis picked up.

“Road Kill Cafe, you kill ‘em, we grill ‘em,” he greeted, using the rerouting system to alter his voice. There was a pause, then a click. “Hello? No? Okay then.”

The line beeped again. Curtis picked up, switching to the next voice programmed into the system.

“Dooney & Bourke, Southfield Mall. How can I help you?” Click. Beep. Curtis began flipping through the dozen or so voices in the system almost gleefully. “Carter, McGuire & Associates.” Click. Beep. “Cecelia’s Pizza, what can I get you?” Click. Beep.

This was the one he was waiting for, a call to the number for the security office. He answered with a brisk, no-nonsense tone.

“Security Office, East Wing.”

“Oh! Oh, thank God,” Miller sounded a strange mix of angry and panicked, no doubt finally starting to figure out something was going on even with his lackluster intellect. “This is Admiral Miller. I need someone at the communications room on Level B, ASAP. The door won’t open and I’m locked in.”

“Certainly, sir,” Curtis assured him. “I’ll send some men and an engineer right over. Sit tight.”

“Thank you.”

Curtis ended the call. The line stopped ringing.

“Yes, sir, if the President believes that’s what’s best,” Iverson was saying grimly. “We’ll take him into custody and run tests on his hardware, try to see what he was doing. I’ll also get some of my people up there to check out those satellites, as soon as we know what they are I’ll personally get a full report to you. Yes sir, I promise you the Galaxy Garrison will make sure that whatever these things are, they’re used only for the benefit of Earth. Thank you, sir. You as well.”

Iverson ended the call and addressed the rest of them.

“Curtis, call down to Security,” he requested. “Have them send someone to take Alfred Miller into custody, by order of Admiral Iverson.”

“Oooh, _exciting_ ,” Curtis answered.

There was an address now going out on the Emergency Broadcast System. Curtis patched it through to Iverson, Captain Shirogane, and Sam, and while they listened to the President assure everyone that there was nothing to worry about, that it was just some Garrison test satellites, he called the security office.

“We’re going to need four armed guards to the Level B communications room,” he commanded. “Mr. Alfred Miller is to be taken into custody, by order of the Secretary of Defense and Admiral Iverson. He may have locked himself in when he realized he was caught, but our computer techs are currently trying to remove his permissions from the system. Let us know when you get there and we’ll try to override his lock protocol.

“He’s to be held under the Terrorist Threat and National Security Act. He is not to be provided with counsel and he is not to be asked for his statement. The Admiral will contact you with further orders once we have a better idea of the scope of Miller’s espionage.”

He waited for confirmation, and for the security office to end the call. As the President’s brief address began to play again on repeat, he minimized the feed.

“He’ll be in custody shortly, sir.”

“I’m glad Allura’s not here,” Coran frowned, disconnecting the bridge’s connection to Miller’s console. “She’s rather noble when it comes to leading, she wouldn’t like this at all. Can’t say I like it much, either.”

“Arthur Miller is a coward and a criminal,” Captain Shirogane answered. “He only got his position because he was still alive after the occupation, he hid in a shelter while people like Allura fought and died to protect this planet. And in the last six months he’s embezzled over two hundred thousand dollars from the alleged veterans’ charity he started after the occupation, money that was meant to go to the families of people whose faces are on that memorial wall.”

“Sometimes karma needs a little bit of help,” Curtis said to Coran. “He would go down for the embezzlement once we exposed it anyway, may as well put him to use for us at the same time. Now we won’t have to wait months for clearance to launch the planet’s new defense system.”

“I have to go prepare to address the Garrison, and coordinate our “investigation” into that system,” Iverson interjected. “But before I go, do we have any word on our missing soldiers?”

“We have reason to believe that Lance McClain is alive, sir,” Captain Shirogane answered. “And while we can’t verify the identities of who he’s with, we believe he’s not alone. Intel says he’s on a ship capable of jumping, but they haven’t approached Coalition airspace. The constant jumps indicate they’re running from someone, so I’d hesitate to say he was on an enemy vessel. Why they haven’t made contact with us…we don’t know.”

“All right. Let me know as soon as you have more information,” Iverson answered. “Congratulations, Commander Duchesne, your promotion has officially been moved up. You’re now in command of the IGF Atlas until Captain Shirogane is back on board to finalize the new bridge staff.”

“Uh…?” Curtis left the full question unasked, looking at Iverson with wide eyes and pointing to himself with both hands.

Leaving him in charge of one of Earth’s most destructive warships, a deadly weapon meant to be treated with the utmost respect and care and definitely not to be used for anything even closely resembling Stupid Shit?

That was a _terrible_ idea.

“Yes, you,” Iverson snorted. “Gentlemen.”

He disconnected his line. Coran excused himself to go down to the engine room to meet up with Sam, to prepare to go in and remove their equipment under the guise of an investigation. Curtis watched him go, leaving him alone on the bridge of a ship he very much did not feel confident in running. Even temporarily.

“Relax, you’ll be fine,” Captain Shirogane gave him an encouraging smile. “Before I go, how close are we to being ready to travel?”

“The crew is loading up now,” Curtis answered, beginning to shut down all the news feeds and other comm lines. “The jump crystals are charged and any critical damage from the crash on Arus is repaired. We’re running at full power on the balmera crystals, no sign of strain. We’ll be battle-ready within twelve hours.”

“Good. Get a temporary bridge staff and take the Atlas out to Saturn’s orbit in twelve hours, then. Be on call and ready to join a potential fight,” Captain Shirogane requested. “And Commander Duchesne?”

“Yes sir?”

“We have reason to believe Airman McClain might be accompanied by Captain Adam Wolfe.”

“You have what now?” Curtis asked, his head whipping up from the console so fast he almost hurt his neck. “Wait, Adam? Out there? That’s not possible sir, he died in initial invasion.”

“Did he?”

“I mean…that’s what we were told,” Curtis reasoned. His brain started running a mile a minute, paging through everything he knew about the fallen pilots. “He was one of the last in the air, along with Second Lieutenant Kaitlin Morrow and Captain Jared Griffin. They were all fired on with the same ion cannon blast. I was there in the command center, sir, manning the pilot communications.”

“The military doesn’t always tell the whole truth, Commander Duchesne.”

“Curtis.”

“Curtis,” Captain Shirogane acknowledged. “I checked your file, I notice you have no history with the military prior to being given the rank of Major. Which is kind of odd since I’ve seen pictures of you with a Garrison alumni ring. I’m tempted to assume you were drafted into an intelligence and special tactics force after graduation.”

“If you’re referring to the Ghosts, sir, they don’t exist,” Curtis deflected. “Urban legend. It’s more likely a chunk of my file got lost in the chaos after the invasion. I’m just a communications officer.”

“Of course.”

“But, a suggestion, Captain?”

“Shiro.”

“Shiro. A word of advice,” Curtis frowned. “If Captain Wolfe is alive, you probably don’t want to show up without some way to keep him separate from Lieutenant Kogane. His expulsion was the direct result of brandishing a weapon toward Captain Wolfe.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Shiro seemed genuinely shocked, which didn’t really surprise Curtis. There wasn’t exactly any reason for anybody to tell him that as long as Adam was presumed dead. “I don’t…are you sure?”

“Yes sir. I disarmed him during the incident myself. Captain Wolfe tried to plead the kid’s case with Iverson afterward and get him one more chance, but he was on thin ice himself for going MIA for three days. Admiral Sanda was done and wanted somebody punished. Iverson could only vouch for leniency for one of them, and he chose Adam. So there’s bad blood there.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Shiro answered, frowning hard. “Thank you.”

He ended the call, and Curtis looked around the empty bridge. He liked being a soldier, and he liked being an officer, and he liked being a communications specialist. But leading a ship was something one had to sort of work toward, not have it dumped in their lap along with the declaration that one of their dead friends wasn’t actually dead. Right after a morning of committing a series of steadily more serious crimes, no less.

Technically, Curtis had been third in command anyway, after Shiro and Iverson, so he had no trouble pulling up the personnel files of the Atlas crew. Wondering if—and hoping that—Shiro was correct about Adam, he set to work trying to put together a reliable temporary bridge crew in case they were called into a fight.

* * * * * * * * * *

Shiro threw open the cockpit door and immediately honed in on Keith, splayed out lazily on the bed waiting for the confidential meeting to be over. As soon as their eyes met Shiro could tell Keith knew he was furious, and probably why as well.

“You pulled your knife?” Shiro exclaimed. It hadn’t been this hard to not completely flip out since Slav had pushed every button he had back on Beta Traz. “On a fellow soldier? That’s why you got expelled, because you _lost your fucking mind_?”

“I wasn’t going to do anything!” Keith defended, pushing himself up from the bed.

“You had to be disarmed by a commanding officer?” Shiro seethed. “On Garrison property? Before they even arranged my _funeral_?”

“It was just to shake him up!” Keith answered. “He started running his mouth when I confronted him outside the memorial for being on his phone the whole time! He was trying to get me mad on purpose!”

“Of course he was trying to get you mad on purpose!” Shiro practically yelled. “He’s an arrogant asshole, that’s what he _does_!”

He had to force himself to stop there, taking a very deep breath. He could practically feel his voice starting to go higher, which meant he was getting so tense he was eventually going to seriously lose his temper. Shiro did not like when that happened.

“I don’t care what he said to you,” he tried to keep his voice even. “No matter how bad you _think_ he was that day, I’ve known him since we were teenagers and I guarantee that you’ve never seen him ramped up to eleven. And the problem isn’t even who it was, Keith, it’s just…the absolute disrespect.

“I pushed to get you into the Garrison, I vouched for you every time you got in trouble. I went to war for you to keep you there so you could get on the right path and have a decent life. I could almost understand you being expelled over vague “discipline problems” because I assumed it was just a steady accumulation of small things you couldn’t help.

“But to find out that you threw away every scrap of the reputation that I put on the line for you once I was gone by doing something as stupid as threatening another person’s life with a weapon? Just because you got _mad_? What the hell, Keith. Was everything I did only worth anything to you while I was alive?”

“It wasn’t like that!” Keith snapped. “I just—”

He got frustrated, covering his face with both hands and letting out a small growl when he couldn’t find the words. He flopped back down on the bed after a moment, letting his hands fall away.

“When I thought you were gone I felt like maybe if he hadn’t been so against you going to Kerberos, maybe if he hadn’t been so intent on leaving you…maybe if he’d taken better care of you in those last few weeks, you would’ve been healthier longer and the crash wouldn’t have happened.”

“He did take care of me,” Shiro answered. “He always took care of me, we always took care of each other.”

“He couldn’t even be bothered to come to the launch.”

“We discussed it beforehand. We decided _as a couple_ that he wouldn’t be there because he couldn’t handle it.”

Shiro felt his frustrations rising. This was one of those situations where everyone was at fault, but at the same time nobody was at fault. He started to slowly pace, unable to completely contain his agitation.

“Did you know he went to bat for you after you attacked him?” He asked. “Commander Duchesne says he went to Iverson to try and stop your expulsion.”

Silence from Keith. Of course he hadn’t known that, Shiro already knew he hadn’t known. In his frustration it was very tempting to rub it in, but he wanted the situation to get better, not worse. He continued to pace, tamping down his temper. He had several false starts as he tried to put his anger into actual words, ones that would be productive instead of widening rifts.

“Adam didn’t like you,” he said finally. “He was honest about it, it wasn’t a secret. But he was an adult and he acted like it, he respected the fact that I cared about you. He respected that you were a personal choice that I made. He didn’t get jealous of time I spent with you, or try to get me to stop. He didn’t like the way you behaved, but he didn’t take it upon himself to be judge and jury about it. Adam never got involved in my relationship with you because he trusted me, he trusted my judgement.”

Keith was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at the floor instead of him. Shiro still felt vaguely guilty about being gone in that year after Kerberos, and for not dedicating more time to Keith during their time in the Castle of Lions. Before Krolia there had literally been no one else, and now here Keith was, physically in his twenties but still lacking so many of the life lessons other people his age had learned from the adults in their lives. It was so very frustrating, dealing with someone who was technically grown but still didn’t understand so many unspoken things that adults understood.

“You were sixteen when I left,” Shiro continued. “As close as we were you were still a kid, and there were things I didn’t share with you. Maybe the few things you did see in my relationship with Adam gave you the impression you knew the whole story, but you didn’t. And I’m not going to go into those details now, because they’re still private.”

“Well there must have been a lot you didn’t tell me, because I never even saw him smile when you were together,” Keith murmured.

“You never saw us have sex either, but that sure as hell happened. A lot.” It was a little crude, but he hoped it got the message across. “Adam and I were soldiers, when you saw us together it was on Garrison grounds. We conducted ourselves as soldiers.”

He crossed his arms and kicked Keith’s shin, forcing the younger man to look up at him.

“You were a child then, but you’re not now,” Shiro said. “It’s time for you to act like it. There’s a very real chance Adam is alive, and if that’s the case I don’t need you to like him. I don’t need you to feel any particular way toward him at all. What I need is for you to understand that I’m not an idiot, to trust my judgement and understand that I fell in love with a person I know a lot better than you do.”

Keith sighed and nodded.

“All you have to base your opinion of him on is the memories you have from when you were a teenager,” Shiro said gently. “Memories fade and shift a little over time, you can’t rely on the way you saw the world then to shape the way you think now. And that’s something important you need to work on now, more than ever, because there’s something we’ve been avoiding talking about since we left the outpost.

“We don’t know how the Blue Lion will react if we bring Adam home,” Shiro frowned. “On one hand, nothing may change at all. On the other, everything may change and you may end up with Adam as one of your Paladins. If that happens, and if the two of you can’t find some kind of common ground, there is no way those Lions are ever forming Voltron again.”

He could tell from the look on Keith’s face that this was something the other Paladin had considered, and that he didn’t like it. But they didn’t choose who piloted the Lions, the Lions did. And honestly, Keith and Adam had more in common than not, more in common than most of them in fact. Their attitudes, their tendency to lash out.

Their heritage.

“You were really short when I left,” Shiro noted, sitting down on the edge of the bed next to Keith. He felt a little bit tired, getting angry always left him feeling that way. He hated it, he hated fighting with people he cared about.

“Okay, wow, I know you’re mad but seriously.”

“No, you were small when you were young, it’s just a fact. And Adam’s taller even than me,” Shiro answered, letting himself fall back into a slouch, half-leaning against the wall. “While you were gone, Hunk pulled some of Adam’s things and sent hair to Ryner to be analyzed. It came back as half nonhuman.”

Keith was looking at the far wall rather than him, but Shiro could see his eyes slide to the side in curiosity. As much as he was learning to embrace the Galra side of his blood, Shiro knew he still felt insecure about how different it made him from everyone else. Maybe he didn’t like Adam much, but the thought of other human-alien hybrids was of interest to him.

“It’s something called Nixa, they were from Nalquod. They were predators that hunted humanoid inhabitants of the system, it’s entirely possible Galra were a regular meal.”

“That doesn’t make this any better, Shiro.”

“Stop it, that’s not how I meant it,” Shiro flicked Keith on the back of the head, hard. “He’s never hurt anyone, and he’s never wanted to. I’m just saying that maybe somewhere in the lizard part of your brain—which in your case is about ninety percent of what’s in your skull sometimes—you had some instinct saying “oh crap, I’m just a little Galra and this big, tall thing might eat me.” Maybe if you try to filter some of that out of the equation, he won’t get to you so much.”

There was a soft beep, drawing their attention to the viewscreen that flashed up at Keith’s wrist. They had caught up to the Blue and Red Lions.

“You keep talking about him in present tense,” Keith noticed. He rose, starting to head back to the the cockpit. “You’re completely confident we’re going to find him alive and well, aren’t you?”

“No,” Shiro admitted, shifting once he had moved to lay out on his back, folding his hands under his head. “But it’s been a long time since I hoped for something, I’m not about to let that go so easily.”

“Well, if we do find him then…I’ll see what I can do,” Keith grumbled. “Really depends on him, though.”

It was the closest Shiro was going to get to Keith agreeing to try. Verbally, at least. And until Shiro personally saw Adam walking and talking and alive with his own eyes, he had other things to worry about besides pushing for more.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years ago**_ :

“You’re sure you won’t come to the launch?”

It was a stupid question, considering Adam had just come out of his bedroom and put his packed suitcase by the door. But Shiro was holding out a slim hope he might get an unexpected answer.

“I can’t. I’m sorry,” Adam answered without looking at him. “We talked about this.”

“I know. But there’s still time to change your mind, is all.”

“There’s still time to change yours, too.”

That was the end of that exchange. Adam went into the kitchen, leaving Shiro sprawled on the sofa with the TV on mute, absently watching it with subtitles.

The shuttle to Kerberos launched tomorrow morning, it was the beginning of one of the most important missions in Shiro’s life and the end of everything else. They were in the final countdown to the collapse of anything he’d built up over the years that wasn’t military-related.

But he couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, change course.

Kerberos was the farthest any human mission had ever gone. Out to Pluto, to the edge of the solar system, this was humanity’s last safe step before the leap of faith that would take them out into deep space. This wasn’t about breaking records or being famous anymore, this was about personally having a hand in weaving the tapestry of an entire species’ collective achievement.

Someone always had to be first, someone always had to put everything at risk in order to light the way for everyone else.

Life wasn’t fair, so people had to make it fair. Shiro was never going to live to settle down and raise kids and grow old, that had been taken away from him as soon as he’d gotten his diagnosis. In exchange, he was going to take this for himself instead. He was going to make the short time allotted him worth something.

He could hear the sound of a knife on the chopping board even though he knew Adam wasn’t actually going to eat anything he made. Adam had gotten more and more wound up as the days counted down and had stopped eating entirely two days ago. If his usual pattern held, that meant he would be completely uninterested in food for at least one more day before he broke down and ate half his weight in whatever caught his eye at the meat counter in the supermarket.

Shiro got up and followed the sounds, stopping to lean in the doorway of the kitchen. The bright, cheerful kitchen of the apartment Adam had chosen after graduating from the Garrison. He’d liked the white of the cabinets and the silver of the back-splash, and the shining flecks in the black counter tops that he always said reminded him of the stars. He was at the counter now, in that one worn out pair of jeans he only ever wore at home so nobody would ever see him in public in anything with holes in the knees.

It was an achingly beautiful picture, him with his messy hair and an old, oversized band t-shirt, surrounded by the potted greenery that hung down from above the cabinets and the carefully tended flowers lining the windowsill.

It was a picture of home, perfect on its own but still with space for the small things time would add under normal circumstances. A cat perched on the far end of the counter, a dog sitting at Adam’s feet hoping for treats, a pair of those stupid matching mugs married couples always received from someone at their wedding hanging over the sink. Someday—maybe—a collection of those brightly colored alphabet magnets plastered low on the refrigerator where small hands could reach.

It hurt to think that someday, somebody else would be standing here looking at that picture. Someone who had the years to give to make those additions and make it complete.

But life wasn’t fair.

Shiro crossed the kitchen and reached around Adam, putting his hands on the other man’s wrists and pulling them away from the knife and vegetables he was working on.

“Stop,” he requested. “You don’t have to make me anything.”

“It’s fine,” Adam mumbled, pulling his hands away to keep chopping furiously. “It’s just dinner, part of the routine.”

He was going too fast. Not that Adam wasn’t skilled with knives, the kitchen was his domain and he was a pro at everything it involved, but he was moving the blade too fast and slamming it down too hard to be okay. The last thing Shiro wanted was for him to slice off a finger in his distress, so he tried again. This time when he pulled Adam’s hand away from the knife he picked it up and moved it out of Adam’s reach.

“Really, it’s okay,” Shiro insisted. “You’ve been running around all day. And I’m not really hungry, I’ll just order something in later if I change my mind.”

“Fine.”

Adam pulled away from him and picked up the cutting board, crossing the small kitchen to brush the carrot and pepper he’d already chopped into the little bin he used to collect vegetable scraps for compost. He didn’t sound or look angry or irritated, just…defeated. His shoulders were slumped and his fingers were less deft than usual, making a small mess during his efforts.

“I, um, I stopped at the pharmacy on my lunch break,” Adam murmured without turning around, trying to scoop up the bits of carrot he’d spilled across the counter. “I dropped your prescription off at the supply depot so they could load it up with everything else. You’ll be four days short of your scheduled return date, but the doctor said that should be okay. Um…if you call him as soon as you’re back he’ll clear a spot in his schedule for you to evaluate and get you a new prescription…”

He couldn’t seem to get his hands to work properly, picking up and dropping the same piece of carrot several times before balling his hands into frustrated fists and leaning against the counter, his head tilted back and taking deep breaths with his eyes closed.

“Adam…”

“You have to set your watch,” Adam cut him off, opening his eyes again and moving around the kitchen to clean up the rest of his nonexistent mess. “You’ll lose track of time out there, you always do. Nine-thirty on the dot and make sure you eat something first, you know how you get when you take things on an empty stomach.”

“Okay.” Shiro knew Adam wasn’t actually listening to him, so no more complicated answer was necessary.

“The lease is paid up for a year, they’ll have a key for you in the safe down at the receptionist desk when you get back,” Adam had begun to wipe the counter down, even though it was still spotless from the last six times he’d cleaned it. “Your phone and car insurance are paid. I know you told me not to, but its less to worry about when you get back.”

“All right.”

“I’m forgetting something,” Adam whispered, dropping the washcloth to rub his eyes with both hands. “I’m forgetting something and I don’t know what. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

Shiro reached over and hooked Adam’s belt loop, pulling him out of the kitchen. He hadn’t stopped moving since he’d come home from work today, and the more time that passed the closer he seemed to come to the thin line between numbness and hysterics. He steered him into the living room and made him sit on the sofa before grabbing him a bottle of water from the fridge.

There wasn’t much else in there. Adam had already cleaned it out after he’d packed all of his things, he would be moving the boxes to his new place over the course of the next week.

“Where are you staying?” Shiro asked curiously, nodding to the suitcase by the door. Adam had taken off work for a week to intentionally not be in town when the Kerberos shuttle launched.

“Cabin in Colorado,” Adam answered unhappily. “Made sure I got one without a TV. Just going to do some hunting and fishing.”

“Are you sure you’ll be okay up there alone?” Shiro was concerned, and he felt he had good reason.

Even he had never really seen Adam the way he’d been the last few days. Shiro’d thought he knew what to expect, but clearly that had been hubris on his part. Adam had begun to become more predictable as he got older, but he had now fully lost all progress on that front. It was like interacting with the younger version again, the wild and unpredictable Adam Wolfe he’d known back in their Garrison days.

The Adam who paid no attention to traffic when speeding out into the road on his motorcycle, and tested if something was poisonous by putting it in his mouth. To say Shiro didn’t trust him to be alone in the woods for several days right now would be an understatement, but he was aware that he no longer had any right to an opinion on the matter.

He offered Adam the water bottle, but Adam stared right past it. After a second Adam surged to his feet, not even noticing that he nearly knocked Shiro over as he left the living room and headed for his bedroom.

Shiro had been sleeping in the apartment’s second bedroom since Adam’s decision that Kerberos meant their relationship was ending. It had been his bedroom when they’d first moved in as roommates, before they’d become involved. He hadn’t really asked Adam if that was what he wanted, he just felt that getting them both used to sleeping alone might be a good idea.

Adam was tearing through a smaller box that random things from his desk had been dropped in, throwing things across the room with no regard for what they were or where they landed.

“Adam,” Shiro tried to be a little firmer this time, coming into the room and resting a hand on the other pilot’s shoulder.

“Lesson plan,” Adam answered. His sounded desperate, like everything important in the universe hinged on this concept. “I forgot to leave a lesson plan. I need my phone contact sheet, I need to call Sheppard. She’ll look for one tomorrow and there won’t be any, I have to let her know I didn’t have time to do it. She’ll probably be pissed—”

“ _Adam_.” Shiro gripped his shoulders and made him turn around to face him, and Adam’s expression was so wide-eyed and dazed Shiro almost wondered if he’d self-medicated. But he knew better, drugs had never been Adam’s thing even at his worst. “It will be fine. She’s covered your class before, she’s not going to be mad.”

Adam was overcompensating now, that wasn’t difficult to see. He was trying to keep busy, because if he stopped moving, stopped doing, he was going to have to think about the fact that his whole life was going to suddenly be completely different tomorrow. It was his normal procrastination behavior magnified by a thousand.

“Sorry,” Adam mumbled, pushing Shiro’s hands off him like they burned and covering his face with both hands. “I’m a mess. I thought I would be better, I thought I would be calmer. It’s just…I just…”

He finally gave up entirely, sinking down to his knees and twisting to hide his face against the side of the bed. The sound of him crying was heartbreaking, absolutely soul-crushing, and knowing that he was the cause made it all the more painful. Shiro sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, petting Adam’s hair.

It lasted for a few minutes before the muffled sounds died down, leaving the room in silence. Shiro felt like he should go, leave Adam alone, but there as a selfish piece of him that wanted to spend his last hours on Earth at Adam’s side, even if it wasn’t on the best of terms. At length the sounds died down, leaving them sitting in the faintly lit bedroom in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro broke the quiet, his hand stilling in Adam’s hair. “I know it doesn’t mean anything at this point, but I am. This isn’t the way I wanted things to be.”

He paused, hating himself for what he was about to say. He knew what he was about to ask was beyond selfish.

“I know you can’t handle this anymore,” he said. “I know it’s not fair to keep running off to do the things I need to do then coming back and expecting you to help undo the damage. But is there any chance at all, even a small one, that when I get back you’ll still be there? If I come back from this one last mission, and I go through treatment and I get back on my feet myself, maybe find a medical trial I qualify for…is there a chance you'd still be around?”

Adam was looking at the floor but now his gaze rolled up to Shiro, framed in a very unamused expression.

“Did you really just ask me what the odds are I’ll be riding a new dick in six months just in case you’re still healthy enough to bone again?” He asked hollowly.

That technically was not what Shiro had asked, but he winced anyway. Adam had every right to be mean about this, he was hurting badly and Shiro knew he was the cause.

“I’m not doing the relationship thing again,” Adam stated, getting up to his feet and running his fingers under his eyes to wipe away the last of his tears. “This is bullshit, I don’t need it and I don’t want it.”

He left the room and Shiro rose and followed, out of the bedroom and back into the kitchen. This time instead of trying to cook anything Adam opened the cabinet under the sink, pulling out the whiskey bottle there.

“Look at me, Takashi…I’m a goddamn mess,” he said tiredly, gesturing to himself as he uncapped it and got himself a glass. “Falling in love with you made me weak. It made me fucking _pathetic_. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m crying on the frigging floor. I’d have to be out of my mind to ever want to get involved with someone again.”

“Please stop that,” Shiro answered.

He crossed the kitchen to grab and pour himself a shot of his own. Leaning against the counter he rested a hand on Adam’s hip, pulling him closer, and in spite of the harsh complaints Adam didn’t fight him.

“I love you,” Shiro threw back his shot and set the glass down, his free hand moving to tangle lightly in Adam’s hair and pull him down so their foreheads touched. “No matter what you want people to think, you’re sweet, you’re kind, you’re compassionate. And that’s on top of being beautiful and confident. There are going to be a lot of people after me who fall in love with you, don’t let me being a selfish asshole stop you from trusting any of them.”

Adam let out a deep sigh through his nose, putting his untouched glass on the counter. He draped his arms around Shiro’s neck, closing his eyes when they started to tear up again.

“I don’t know where I’ll be when you get back,” he finally answered. “Or where I’ll be if you recover enough to not be hospital-bound. We could all be dead tomorrow, I can’t plan that far in advance. Maybe I’ll be around, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll be available, maybe I won’t. All I can tell you is that I won’t be sitting around waiting. If you’re fit enough to still be interested, you’re just going to have to find an excuse to track me down and see if you still have a shot.”

“That’s fair,” Shiro murmured, reaching over to turn on the music app on the tablet settled in the holder above the counter. “Just promise me something?”

He started to sway lightly to the quiet music that began to play, pulling Adam along with him. One last dance, out of the hundreds they’d had in this kitchen over the years. Adam didn’t fight him at all, leaning into him and resting his head on Shiro’s shoulder.

“No matter what happens, try to be happy?” Shiro asked. “Whatever that means for you. Keep taking guitar lessons, get your doctorate, start a family, open a coffee shop. You don’t have to show up Janet anymore, you don’t have to stay in the military. Do your own thing.”

“We’ll see.”

Not a promise. Because Adam Wolfe didn’t make promises unless he intended to keep them, which was why he never made promises at all. That was as close as Shiro was going to get.

They moved slowly with the music, not talking, just being in each others’ presence for what could—and likely would—be the last time. It made Shiro’s heart hurt, and for a moment he started to consider his options. There was a backup pilot ready to go for the Kerberos mission, there were always backup pilots for missions. Even if he were to call tonight and tell them he was staying on Earth, the mission would still take off on time without an issue…

Except Shiro knew he would accomplish nothing by staying. He would buy a few years, tops, and then they would be saying this goodbye again. Only this time there would be no last dance, because they would be saying their goodbye in a hospital or hospice care. Even his question about whether he had a chance when he got back was just pointless wondering, something to give himself false hope and a vague purpose to fill the quieter hours of his upcoming trip.

“Hey,” Shiro whispered, gently nudging Adam to lift his head and resting their foreheads together again so he could see his face. “Sing for me? One last time.”

“Like you deserve it,” Adam scoffed. Even so, he reached over to change the song, flipping through them until he found one he wanted before melting back into Shiro’s arms.

This was perhaps the most precious thing that Shiro was giving up for Kerberos. Anybody could look at Adam and see that he was beautiful, anyone could flirt with him and get sometimes salacious responses. He had no problem dancing in public, and he really did give almost anything of himself to anybody who needed him.

“ _I, I would give anything, but for the grace of God I’m here and still aware. We know the end is overrated, we’ve become the walls we raise, we don’t believe enough but we still care…standing on the edge without a prayer._ ”

Except this. The only place Adam would sing was in the quiet safety of home, and only for Shiro. There was nothing that had ever lit up Shiro’s life like coming home from having Iverson drive his unit into the ground all day to find Adam, changed into sweatpants and a t-shirt, piles of papers he had been grading laid out on the coffee table while he danced happily in the kitchen. Moved by some song on his playlist to get up and sing his heart out.

“ _All of the time we’ve lost…all of the love we gave…and now these hands are tied, I can’t help thinking, that I was in a daze and I was losing my place, I was screaming out at everything, waiting for the walls to come down, before my moment starts to fade, but everything that’s perfect falls away_.”

Shiro closed his eyes, listening to the soft voice. Trying to commit every meter and cadence to memory, to draw on later when this treasure was gone. Even though he knew that anything he could conjure up in his head would only pale in comparison to the real thing. Selfishly, Shiro had the stray thought that he hoped nobody else would ever have these particular special moments, that Adam would still be happy again someday but that nobody else would ever see him bare his soul the way he did when he sang.

“ _So come on, come on, we can be saved, the lives we live, the wars we wage, when everyone just tells us how to feel, we’re sleeping at the wheel…_ ”

Adam trailed off as the song approached its end and Shiro opened his eyes. He knew he’d passed on his chance and this was over but he couldn’t help himself, reaching up to cup Adam’s face with one hand and pull him into a soft kiss.

A soft kiss that slowly became a very insistent one, bordering on desperate, on behalf of both parties. Shiro wasn’t sure when they started to move or who had instigated, he only became aware at some point that he was backing down the hallway, the two of them stumbling in their unwillingness to break the kiss. His bedroom was closer, he kicked open the door and pulled Adam in with him, backing up until his knees hit the bed and they both fell down onto the mattress.

Clothing was a barrier, fabric falling victim to unforgiving hands, pulled off without care and thrown in any direction without notice. The kiss melted into plaintive panting, a pliant body arching up against his, skin against warm skin. Fingers tangled in his hair, gently at first then harder, more insistent, manicured nails ran down his back in a way that gave him pleasant chills, legs wrapped around his hips to pull him closer. Panting gave way to begging moans, to his name whispered longingly in his ear.

It was a confusing mix of heartbreak and bliss, fading into a tired tangle of limbs and blankets. Shiro fell asleep with his arms around Adam, the other man curled up against him with his head tucked under Shiro’s chin.

And in the morning, Shiro woke up alone.

His eyes fluttered open half an hour before his alarm was set to go off and he instinctively reached over, his hand finding only the cold, empty mattress instead of a familiar, welcome body. He woke fully, pushing himself up on his elbows to look around, but found no sign of his now-official ex.

He started to get up, reaching up to brush away a tickling at his chest, and his fingers closed around something hanging from his neck on a thin chain. It was Adam’s pendant, the little glass disc with water and gold flakes that he’d had since he was small, presumably a gift from his grandparents because he’d always loved to swim in the river behind their house when he’d lived with them.

It was very important to Adam, Shiro knew that…the one physical thing he had as proof that somebody, at some point, had loved him. He never took it off unless he absolutely had to, and even then he kept track of it with an attentiveness bordering on neuroticism.

Shiro hauled himself out of bed and did a quick check of the apartment, half-hoping and ending with only disappointment. Adam was gone, on his way to Colorado.

He showered and dressed, going to the kitchen to grab some toast before he left. He found a plate of bacon and eggs waiting for him, wrapped and covered to keep it warm as long as possible, and then it hit him.

This was it. It was over.

Shiro wasn’t prone to crying. Adam held it in until he finally exploded, like he had last night, but Shiro just wasn’t the type of person who got the urge to cry. He was even-tempered, usually, and able to calm himself when bad things happened, generally able to accept things and move on quickly.

But that was before this sudden discovery of what it felt like to realize a huge part of him was just…gone.

There was no one around to see, no one to bother. No one to make any comment half an hour later, when he was still sitting on the kitchen floor, leaning back against the refrigerator with his face in his hands. Many people said that crying was a catharsis, it was a way to vent chemical imbalances by drainage through tears. It was supposed to even a person out, make them feel better.

It just gave Shiro a headache.

When he was able to, he got up off the floor and went to wash the evidence from his face. He took one last walk through the apartment—his apartment now, Adam would never be coming back here—and left the building one last time. By the time he arrived at the Garrison he was right on time rather than his usual half an hour early, and the events of the previous night were lost in the whirlwind of preparations.

It wasn’t until several hours later that Shiro had a moment to himself, while he waited for the order to board the shuttle for launch. Sam and Matt were off to the side with Colleen and Sam’s daughter, whose name he couldn’t remember, and even though Shiro knew he wouldn’t see Adam’s face he scanned the crowd anyway.

Keith was there, but he had definitely expected that.

“Excited?” Keith asked when Shiro came to lean against the railing next to where he was standing, looking out over the desert and the Garrison in the near distance. “It’s not going to be long now.”

“Excited,” Shiro agreed. “Little bit nervous, but that’s any trip. You’re not counting down the minutes until I’m gone so you can start being a little shit again, are you?”

“Again?” Keith asked, raising an eyebrow. “I never stopped, I just got sneakier.”

“Hearing that makes me so proud,” Shiro said with mock happiness, resting a hand over his heart. “Finally, someone willing to carry on my longtime campaign to legitimately put Iverson in the nuthouse.”

Keith looked around, his smile fading a little before he looked up at Shiro questioningly.

“He couldn’t make it,” Shiro lied. “Something important came up.”

“This is important,” Keith frowned.

“Something more important.”

Keith looked up at him, and Shiro cursed himself for even bothering to try. The kid was sixteen, not ten. He wasn’t stupid.

“He left you, just like he said he would,” Keith deduced.

“He left,” Shiro agreed, looking up at the shuttle. “But it’s all right. Hey, can you do me a favor?”

“Depends on the favor.”

Shiro carefully removed the pendant from where it was tucked under his flight suit. He knew he’d be able to smuggle it on board, even though he technically wasn’t supposed to have it, and he had been planning to do so. But having it on made him nervous, it made him feel like he had very precious cargo that he was going to mess up and destroy somehow. He took it off, holding it out for Keith to take.

“You have to be very careful with this, okay?” Shiro insisted. “This is important, Keith, more than anything you’ve ever handled. You can’t break it, you can’t lose it. I need you to keep this safe for me until I get back.”

“What is it?” Keith asked, holding it up to look at it in the light. Over by Sam, an officer was motioning for Shiro to join them and prepare for boarding.

“An excuse to show up,” Shiro answered.

He gave Keith a smile and clapped him on the shoulder, and pushed away from the railing to go and join his crew. This was it, it was time. Humanity’s first true steps toward deep space.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

Shiro was sitting cross-legged in the Black Lion’s cockpit, leaning back against the side of Keith’s chair. About an hour ago he had finally gotten finished being torn into by Allura, who had not been impressed that he, Iverson, Coran, and Sam had framed a Garrison Admiral in order to launch their new defense system without clearance.

Of course, Shiro had always felt it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission, so while he did mean that he was sorry when he said it, he didn’t mean that he was _sorry_. He meant that he was sorry he was being yelled at, not that he was sorry he’d done it.

Veronica was far more understanding, since she’d had to deal with Admiral Miller more than Allura had. Keith seemed fairly indifferent, but his mind was generally on his goals in space and his attention rarely on Earth. Especially now that the main inhabitant of Earth that ever had his attention was now somewhere out in space.

“This isn’t working,” Veronica’s voice came over the comm. Shiro straightened up a little to peek at her image, his own only displaying the top of his head because of the way he sat.

“I know it’s boring, but we can’t fly the Atlas without a full bridge crew, and we need to seriously vet anyone who’s going to have access to that room.”

“No, I mean I can’t pay attention to this,” Veronica clarified. “I can’t concentrate on stupid personnel files now that I know my brother was apparently in a gunfight and is now running from someone and won’t reach out to us.”

“It’s frustrating, I understand. But we’re going to find your brother, and sometimes even in the middle of war there are just ridiculous spans of waiting. You have to be patient.”

“I’m tired of being patient,” Veronica groaned. “I want to be whiny and unreasonable.”

“Well, you are in Allura’s Lion,” Shiro supposed. “As long as you turn off the comm so we can’t hear you, I don’t see any reason you can’t be.”

“Hey!” Allura shot him a glare. Shiro smiled and sank back down, out of sight.

“Hey,” Keith said suddenly.

“No, I wasn’t greeting you, I was yelling at Shiro,” Allura explained.

“What? No,” Keith blinked in confusion, having not been paying any attention to the rest of them at all. “The tracker I put on Lance just came back online.”

In the corner of his overlays, a small red light was steadily pulsing in time to the signal coming in. Keith pursed his lips and looked over at Allura on the viewscreen.

“I’m going ahead.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Allura asked. “I understand that it’s Lance we’re talking about, and I agree we need to get there as soon as possible, but what if it’s not him? What if he lost the tracker back at the outpost and somebody else is carrying it?”

“There’s one way to find out,” Keith answered, already pulling up maps. “It’s pretty far. Coming toward us, actually, moving in the general direction of Earth. Allura, keep following Red. Even if it’s not Lance with the tracker, he’s in this direction. If you don’t hear back from us in an hour, call for Pidge and Hunk and decide what to do from there. You’re in charge.”

“All right, all right. Be careful.”

“I will. We’ll check in as soon as we know something.”

Shiro put his helmet on and retreated back to the storage bay, grabbing the pillow from Keith’s bed again and heading back to the small supply closet to brace himself. It was about to be another bumpy trip.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a huge chapter (16k+) and I'm absolutely not sorry. The Quantum Abyss ran away with me and it is 100% not my fault.

Adam sat quietly in the engine room, tucked cross-legged up in the far corner of the catwalk. He was out of sight, impossible to see by the no less than three people who had already been in here searching for him so far. The minutes were counting down until it was time depart the Lorelia and head to the medical facility, and he was trying his best to prepare.

The pain came in waves over the last several days, creeping up on him slowly as the contents of his injections metabolized out of his system without being replenished daily. Even in taking Honerva’s advice, eating nothing and consuming only the blood he’d drained from animals he’d hunted while landed, the shots weren’t lasting anywhere near a full two days.

Adam had suspected that would be the case. He had gone so long in the beginning, while keeping James hidden and trying to plot to save Lance, and there was no way internal damage hadn’t been done during that span of time. He couldn’t use the healing pod aboard the Lorelia himself, and anybody he asked to help him would figure out from the readouts that he was running on borrowed time, so he was doing his best to function with organ damage he didn’t even know the extent of.

His current state lessened the effectiveness of the injections, which led to more damage, which led to a shorter injection effect. He had used the last shot just before the ship had gotten underway toward the colony, and he could feel the aches beginning to edge their way back into his body.

But worse than that was the mental decline.

He stayed in the engine room at all times because it was the only place on the ship that had ambient sound, the only place he could speak with someone without swearing he could hear their heart beating. In here, he could always claim his interest in engineering as an excuse to look at the equipment instead of the speaker, to avoid having his attention drift to temptingly unprotected soft spots like their throat.

Footsteps sounded on the metal floor below, making Adam open his eyes to look. Hidden as he was he was still able to see, which was why he’d chosen this spot.

Ariella came into the room, wandering slowly along the path between the equipment, pausing to peek down the narrow spaces she passed along her way. Adam wished she’d just take a quick look and get the hell out, go back to the others, but instead she seemed to stop every five feet to make inspections. He remained still, breathing slow and deep as if she might somehow hear him over the machinery otherwise, waiting for her to finish and go.

“Ow, spitz!” He heard her hiss as she leaned against something sharp.

The smell was immediate, and not coppery or metallic like so many people would describe it. Rich and cloying, poisonously sweet. He felt his nails scrape along the metal he sat on, wanting to dig into something soft and yielding but settling for what was already under them. He’d never been exceptionally sensitive to smells, he still wasn’t, but he picked up on this particular one disturbingly well.

Ariella was still looking, trying to see if he was sitting back in any of the maintenance spaces behind the equipment, her hand pressed against the breastplate of her flight suit but otherwise ignored. She was a trained mech pilot after all, or as trained as a child soldier could be, a little pain wasn’t going to stop her. It should have, her short life would have been longer if she’d just given up and left.

Adam unfolded himself from his spot and rolled under the safety railing, off the edge of the catwalk. He landed on his toes in a silent crouch, creeping through the narrow aisle until he was physically blocking the girl’s retreat. He moved past small, scattered blood droplets, unnoticed by Ariella but a blaring trail to him, everything else feeling strangely desaturated around the vivid spots of red.

She was leaning around a generator to look in the crawlspace so he did the same, careful not to actually touch her. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, he could see the skin at her neck dancing with her pulse, but they were too close to the doorway for him to do anything without risking being seen.

She turned around when she didn’t spot him back there and jumped when she found him in such close, looming proximity. Adam instinctively threw a hand between her head and the corner of the generator, stopping her from knocking herself silly. He didn’t have to hear or see her heart rate jump, he was close enough to practically pick up the scent of that brief flash of fear.

It was like a slap in the face, especially when coupled with the rivulet of crimson running down her flight suit. She wasn’t in any danger of dying—not from the cut, at least—but she had gouged herself pretty deeply. It was a battle to stay still, to try and adjust to the sweetness that clawed at his brain with every breath he took. He was too likely to get caught in this spot, it was too out in the open.

“What are we looking for?” He asked lightly.

“You scared me,” she verified what he already knew, relieved that it was just him. She shouldn’t have been. “It’s almost time for you to go. Lance wanted you to come have something to eat before you leave, he doesn’t think you’ve been eating enough.”

Lance was right, of course. A liquid diet might mean less work for his body to break down but it did very little for hunger, and the scent of blood that heavily colored the air in the confined space did nothing to help. He was tired, he was hungry, and he was beginning to feel very resentful to the universe in general and everything alive in it. Adam gave Ariella a tight-lipped smile and let his hand rest lightly on her head.

“Thank you, but I’m not very hungry. We should bandage that.”

He gently used his hold to force her to turn around, nudging her back along the walkway toward the first aid kit that hung on the back wall. He steered her to walk in front of him, keeping her exit blocked as he glanced down the narrow spaces between the equipment as they walked. He needed somewhere as out of the way as possible.

She would be very easy to handle, she was still fairly small and relatively fragile. She would go quick, with no need to worry about noise, and he would be gone with Lotor long before anybody found what was left of her back in the maintenance crawl space. He already knew he wasn’t coming back, burned bridges were not an issue.

“Can you do me a favor?” He asked, nodding down the final narrow aisle, toward the far back corner of the engine room as he opened the medicine cabinet. “I dropped a wrench from the catwalk this morning, I think it’s still back there. Can you go check for me real quick while I get something for your hand?”

“Sure,” she was more than happy to help, slipping back behind the row of compartments housing the ship’s balmera crystals without complaint.

Adam scanned the contents of the medicine cabinet, picking out an unopened roll of bandages. He opened it up and unfurled it some, inspecting the material, wrapping one end around one of his hands.

“I don’t see it!” Ariella called.

“Can you check back in the corner?” Adam called back. “Hold on, I’ll come help.”

He had a decent length of bandage, twisting the loose end around the fingers of his other hand to pull it taut as he stepped back behind the compartments. The aisles were made narrow but there was enough room that he didn’t really have to squeeze; he could move just fine and she was now trapped.

The young Altean was facing away from him when he reached her, he easily reached down to wrap the bandage around her neck from behind.

“Ariella.”

The voice echoed through the engine room, making him pause before he pulled it tight. He was standing with the bandage leveled a few inches in front of her face, close but not enough to do its job without at least some noise.

“Back here!” Ariella chirped before Adam could stop her. “Looking for a wrench!”

Adam let a frustrated breath out through his nose. He released one end of the bandage just as Lotor appeared at the open end of the aisle, opening his hand instead in a wordless request for Ariella’s injured one. She raised it up where he could reach it and he started to wrap the gash.

“Everything all right?” Lotor asked, looking between them.

“Just trying to clean up any messes I made before I leave,” Adam lied, tying off the end of the bandage and heading back out to the main aisle with the girl skipping along obliviously behind him. “I don’t want to be the one everyone’s mentally cursing when they can’t find their tools.”

He stepped out, and Ariella squeezed out behind him without waiting for him to be completely out of the way. He almost gave into the urge to reach out and grab her by the ponytail before she completely escaped, but Lotor was one of the few people on the Lorelia, maybe the only person, who was a match for him.

“I think it’s time for us to go,” Lotor announced as Ariella left the engine room, leaving them alone. Adam pried his eyes away from the empty doorway to look at him instead.

“I thought we had a little more than half a varga.”

“I said, it’s time for us to go.” Lotor turned and walked away without waiting for further argument.

He knew something was up. Probably not what, but he was definitely suspicious. Which couldn’t really be helped, Adam supposed, since the man was over ten thousand years old and had undoubtedly seen some things. The rest were a little more naive, even the experienced ones.

Adam looked down at the trail of blood droplets on the floor, then at the remains of the bandage roll he’d set on top of one of the crystal compartments after tearing off the length he’d used. It dawned on him like a crashing wave what he’d been about to do, and it shook him to his core how natural the progression had been. At no point had he stopped to think that what he was doing was wrong, at no moment had it occurred to him that something was off.

It wasn’t a sudden, animalistic urge that could be noticed and fought off. It had just been him, in full possession of his faculties, about to casually murder and _eat_ a fucking little kid.

_You’ll go for the smallest ones first, that’s just what predators do._

Adam had scoffed at Honerva’s description of what would happen, assuming she was being dramatic for effect. But this…this could not continue. He couldn’t live like this. He couldn’t live with himself if he really did hurt someone.

He covered his nose and mouth with a hand to try and strangle off that sweet smell, and followed the others out. He had to stop down the hall once he was out in more open air, leaning against the wall and breathing deeply to try and get a handle on himself. He was back in control again when he went to join the others, or at least he hoped he was.

“Hey, you didn’t come to breakfast,” Lance commented as Adam entered the docking bay and made his way to where they all stood by the shuttle. “Are you all right? You haven’t eaten with us since we left the outpost.”

“I’m fine, I’m just not really hungry,” Adam assured him, glancing over toward the shuttle. Lotor stood there, leaning against the side of it with his arms crossed, listening to something Acxa was telling him. “There’s a lot going on, I’m kind of distracted.”

“Distracted,” Lance agreed. “Exhausted. You’re hiding from everyone most of the time and you disappear whenever we land. You don’t look good, man.”

“You’re right. Flight suits don’t bring out my best features the way decent tailored slacks do,” Adam deflected.

“I’m serious,” Lance frowned. “I’m worried. I’m glad you’re going with Lotor. I mean, not because you’ll be stuck with Lotor, but because the time shift will let you slow down for a couple days. I know things are really serious right now, but do me a favor and just…rest a little? I know I can’t understand what you went through while you were a prisoner, but I can see it’s wearing on you really bad.”

Adam looked away from Lotor to Lance, taking in the younger pilot’s face and posture. He was genuinely worried, he really _cared_. It felt like such an alien concept, Adam couldn’t really remember the last time he’d let someone close enough to worry about him. He’d cut his friends out after the announcement of the Kerberos crash, it was easier to stay distant than risk feeling that kind of loss again if anything happened to them, and aside from mentoring Lance he didn’t let himself get too close to any of the students anymore.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like seeing Lance worry about him, and he didn’t like knowing what kind of pain Lance was going to be in when he didn’t return.

“I’m going to be fine.” Adam pulled Lance into a one-armed hug, holding him perhaps a little bit tighter than he normally would. “Don’t worry about me, okay? Nothing is going to happen to me that hasn’t been planned for, remember that. And hey…”

He nudged Lance away from the others, down to the other end of the shuttle. Leaning against it, he sighed and gave Lance a serious look.

“If Kogane really does come for you and gets here before we get back, then I just want you to know I’m glad for you. Even if I think he’s a pain in the ass. In case I don’t get to say it for some reason, if you give him a shot and you decide he’s what you want, then go for broke. None of us know what’s going to happen tomorrow, so if you find something that makes you happy you hold onto it, okay? Even if bitter jerks like me have something to say about it. Sometimes, things that we think will last forever don’t, and I don’t want you to ever find yourself looking back and wishing you’d made more of your time.”

“Adam, Shiro’s going to come,” Lance said softly. “You guys still have plenty of time left now if you just give him it a shot. He’s not the same guy that decided to leave you anymore.”

Adam chose not to respond to that. He rested his hands on Lance’s shoulders and gave him a light kiss on the forehead.

“Be good,” he requested, giving him a push toward the others and heading toward the shuttle entrance himself.

Lance reluctantly made his way back over to Romelle and James, casting a glance at Lotor’s turned back. Adam knew the kid had been going over Lotor’s words in his head since they’d taken off, even more than a year of being a Paladin hadn’t completely broken him of his habit of concentrating more on what he thought he did wrong than what everyone knew he did right. He was likely working his way up to apologizing, even though Adam had already assured him there was nothing for him to apologize for.

He shook his head and boarded the shuttle without any fanfare. He didn’t have anything of his own to bring, the only thing he’d managed to claw back since being taken was his dog tags and they were tucked under his flight suit. There was the little matter of the Atlas’ power crystal, of course, but that was hidden away safely in his pocket. In the chaos everyone had forgotten to ask about it, and he had made no attempt to remind them.

Lotor was still talking to Acxa, giving last minute directions on something to do with the bunker. Adam took the opportunity to reach under the control console of the shuttle and pull out the jammer he had there, taken from the box of interesting little tricks Acxa had stowed in the docking bay. He’d learned it was what she had used to jam communications when she’d taken Lance and James, and he had put it to use jamming Lance’s tracker so the signal wouldn’t go out yet.

He didn’t want Keith showing up too soon, if he really was going to bring Takashi and the Atlas as backup. He needed time to get ready for that first.

Adam switched off the jammer and tossed it in the back of the shuttle, along with the other mix of random things there. Even if anyone found it, they wouldn’t think anything of it. Now he took out his own tracker and turned it on, stowing it under the console in place of the jammer.

“HEY!” Lance’s voice suddenly echoed through the docking bay, loud and angry.

Adam heard the confused voices of others and footsteps as the younger pilot ran across the bay to reach the shuttle, and wondered if the tracker had given some sign of being tampered with. He looked around the shuttle, wondering what he was going to do to keep Lance quiet without hurting him too badly.

“You!” Lance exclaimed, standing in the open doorway.

Adam tensed, his eyes falling on the stun gun at Acxa’s hip. She was standing just outside the shuttle, looking at them curiously.

“I met you my first day at the Garrison!” Lance said angrily. “I was _never_ a stripper! That wasn’t a cough after you told me that, was it? You were laughing! Why would you tell me that? I believed you!”

Outside, James burst out laughing. Romelle joined in as well, and though Lotor didn’t seem to know what was going on Acxa pursed her lips to keep from joining them. Adam forced himself to relax and give Lance a mischievous grin.

“Oh, so you do remember…that’s a shame.”

“I’ll get you back,” Lance threatened, stepping away from the shuttle so Lotor could board. “Seriously, that was low!”

Adam blew him a sarcastic kiss as the shuttle door closed and then turned his attention to the task at hand. He schooled his face into his usual neutral expression, the unreadable blank he used to deal with most people. Lotor took the other pilot seat and everyone outside vacated the area near the shuttle as it rose and moved through the inner airlock doors.

“I don’t know what I walked in on back there,” Lotor said as soon as the inner door closed behind them and the outer airlock began to rise, “but let me make something perfectly clear to you. If you lay a hand on any of those children, I will personally remove your spine from your body through your nasal cavity.”

“Aw,” Adam raised an eyebrow, casting Lotor a sideways glance. “Larry’s got _threats_.”

“Do I sound like I’m joking with you right now?” Lotor asked, looking at him sharply. “You would do well to take my warning very seriously and stay far away from the girls on the ship.”

Adam couldn’t hold back the dark chuckle that escaped, shaking his head a little. Lotor seriously thought that he was, of all things, into forcing himself on kids? God, it was worse. It was _so much worse_.

“I hate to break it to you and ruin whatever weird, pervy narrative you’re writing about me in your head, but my interests these days lean toward grown men. If I was going to hit on anybody on that ship, it would have been James. Even _you’re_ too girly for me, Linsey.”

Lotor’s teeth clenched as he fought to not comment on the second wrong name in as many minutes.

“It’s my job to handle kids,” Adam said smoothly, glancing downward at the Lorelia as it began to shrink away from them. “Kids who are away from their parents and their home for school and are looking for the kind of affection they miss getting from _family_. Ariella cut her hand really badly, she went to look for something for me while I got bandages, I went after her when I saw she was bleeding bad enough to leave a trail. That’s all you walked in on, quit projecting your weirdness on me.”

Lotor wasn’t exactly the easiest guy to read, but Adam could see he’d put some doubts into his head. All he had actually seen was Adam wrapping a bandage around Ariella’s hand, there was really no way he could trust his suspicions that something was wrong without proof. They were also stuck together in a small shuttle for at least a few hours, so he seemed to decide letting it go was the best option for the time being.

The shuttle ran quietly, which was fine at first but eventually began to drive Adam up the wall. He was used to being in a small, confined space, and he was used to being out in space instead of planetside, but he wasn’t used to the quiet. There was always noise at the outpost, even at night, and it wasn’t long before Adam was removing his harness and moving to the back of the shuttle. He started doing some exercising to make a little bit of noise, and to distract himself from his predicament.

Adam was on his third push-up when the gravity turned off. He scrambled to grab at the floor but there was nothing on the smooth metal there for him to get purchase, leaving him floating just out of reach of anything he could grab or use to push or pull himself.

“Oops,” Lotor purred from where he was now leaning back in his seat, still harnessed in, his feet up on the console. “Must have kicked a wrong button. Sorry.”

“I swear to God, I will shave that Rapunzel starter pack off your head if you don’t let me down,” Adam threatened.

“Oh yes, I’m _sure_ your attitude problem will get you out of this situation,” Lotor encouraged. “Keep going, let’s see.”

“I’m serious, you’re really testing my patience right now.”

“Oh, well, since you’re serious.”

Lotor leaned forward and turned the gravity back on. Adam had less than half a second to regret his demand before he slammed into the floor, and then while he was groaning and pushing himself up Lotor hit the switch again and he found himself once again floating up with nothing to grab.

“What the HELL!”

“You didn’t specify how long you wanted it on,” Lotor answered.

Adam did an fairly accurate impression of a falling cat as he twisted and thrashed and tried to get his hands on anything he could either grip to pull himself in or press against to push himself back. It was to no avail, the closest surface was the floor and he was just half an inch shy of his fingertips brushing the surface, no matter how he stretched.

“So how did you end up with this very interesting group?” Lotor asked, lounging again and watching Adam struggle. “Acxa’s filled me in on the children, and told me how she brought Lance and James and that Romelle followed along later. But nobody seems to have any details on how you ended up in the picture except the two Earth pilots, and I’m sure you’ve noticed we’re not exactly on speaking terms for me to ask.”

He swiveled his chair back and forth a bit, using the foot on the console to push himself, chin resting on one hand lazily.

“You understand, it’s just a bit suspicious that one of the very rare humans out here would end up at the same outpost where two other humans show up…unless you were also specifically brought there by Haggar.”

“I understand you talk like a priss,” Adam answered, crossing his arms and adopting a caricature of Lotor’s accent. “ _Do_ tell me how my circumstances are of any great import to one such as yourself.”

Lotor kicked the switch to turn the gravity back on. Adam couldn’t uncross his arms fast enough and this time slammed his face into the floor before Lotor turned it back off, leaving him suspended once more.

“My bad,” Lotor did a ridiculously spot-on impersonation of Lance.

“Stop doing that, you dick!”

“It happens completely by accident, my foot twitches when I’m annoyed. So, your arrival at the outpost.”

“My background is my business,” Adam answered, lightly poking at the spot where he’d hit his cheek on the floor. “I was Sendak’s prisoner of war, that’s all you need to know.”

“Normally you would be correct,” Lotor allowed, pulling his legs down and spinning the chair to fully face Adam. “However, I’m told Sendak attacked your planet eighteen phoebs ago and has been dead for six. Pardon me for being crude, but with your looks, under normal circumstances Sendak would have sold you off to the highest bidder to be physically used until you died. Given that didn’t happen, I presume he had a reason for keeping you. That you weren’t sold by his successor for the same purpose tells me Haggar wanted you.”

“Is that your way of telling me you think I’m pretty?” Adam asked, batting his eyelashes. Lotor reached for the gravity switch again. “Ugh, no!”

“It may be a joke to you, but Haggar does not collect specimens for no reason,” Lotor frowned, withdrawing his hand and leaving Adam floating. “Her experiments with quintessence often aim to hone normal people into far more dangerous creatures. And although I must admit I’ve only met a handful of humans, you’re the only one I’ve ever met who files down his teeth.”

Adam shut his mouth, pursing his lips and clenching his teeth. He glared at Lotor, even though he knew it was his own fault for assuming he wasn’t observant enough to worry about.

“So what are you, is the question,” Lotor continued, unbothered by his silence. “At first I thought perhaps half Galra, you’re fairly tall and somewhat on the slender side…but that would mean at least two Galra would have had to crash on Earth and decide to mix with the local populace within a handful of years of each other. That’s not very likely. So what else has teeth sharp enough that they need to be hidden?”

Adam still didn’t answer. He knew he would be asking the same questions if he were in Lotor’s place, but they still felt like an invasion of privacy. And worse, they were an indirect attack on him personally. There was a lot he didn’t know about where he came from, but up until only a few months ago he had always assumed that it was at least one hundred percent Earth. Adam found it almost offensive that Lotor could be around him for only a few days but figure out something he had lived for decades without knowing about himself.

“You don’t know.” Lotor read his face, which irritated Adam even further. “That’s an unfortunate piece of information for us not to have. Haggar doesn’t bother with anything that’s cuddly and safe.”

He spun his chair back around and turned the gravity back on, this time gradually so Adam had a chance to regain his feet. Adam stumbled a little but got his footing and immediately went back to his own seat and harnessed himself in, just in case Lotor decided to have another button-kicking accident.

“You’re going to need to get a brain scan at some point,” Lotor advised as he settled in. “The code in the wiring for your eyes is going to have to be run for override command protocols. The last human Haggar used as a lab rat had an electronic prosthetic that let her exert control.”

“You’re talking about that Shiro guy?” Adam asked offhandedly.

“One of the Paladins, yes,” Lotor confirmed. “Something happened to him in a fight with the last Galra emperor and he disappeared. He returned to them some months later after having escaped captivity at Galra Central Command, but it turned out not to be him.”

“And how does that work, exactly?” Adam asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from someone other than Honerva.

“Haggar was running something called the Kuron Project,” Lotor answered, adjusting their course on the console. “The Shiro that returned to the Castle of Lions was a clone of the original, implanted with downloaded memories but technically an empty vessel. Alive, in the most basic sense, but programmed rather than independent. He was a sleeper, Haggar used him to see through his eyes while I was working with Princess Allura and the Paladins.

“When Keith returned after taking Romelle from the facility, she gave a story that painted me in a very bad light. They turned on me before I was allowed to explain, and Haggar chose then to activate Kuron to bring be back to Central Command. It was against my will, if I had been conscious I would have fought to stay and speak my piece. I turned my back on Haggar and made my escape with Acxa and two other generals, going by way of her lab to avoid most of the guards. That was where I found out about the project, I downloaded as much as I could from her personal server before we left.”

“So what happened to the clone?” Adam wondered. “You just leave him there?”

“I have no first hand knowledge,” Lotor admitted. “Only what Acxa heard during her time on Earth and recounted. But apparently his prosthetic arm had viral code he uploaded into the Paladins’ ship, which programmed it to melt down and kill them all once he was gone. Keith had followed, the clone itself was sent to dispatch him. Everything was handled without anyone else dying and they kept the clone, supposedly making it Shiro somehow.

“The real man is probably rotting in the quintessence field…the Black Lion has the ability to teleport, it’s likely that doing so incorrectly dumped the pilot during the fight with Zarkon and that he died when he disappeared. The original is gone, and the traceable clones have all been destroyed except the one currently on Earth…I imagine she’d give up anything to get him back and not lose the centuries of research that culminated in him.”

Adam raised his eyebrows, careful not to look like he was affected by any of this information. It was none of Lotor’s business that he knew the subject of the conversation, he had never been one to overshare and he wasn’t about to start now.

“So you think Honerva might have some kind of controls in my head waiting to be activated at the least opportune time?” He asked.

He already knew the answer to this problem too, and that was that there was most certainly not anything about him Honerva had control over. If she had been able to just flip a switch in his head she wouldn’t be paying him so attractively for his service. No, what was in Adam’s head was just plain old medical grade wiring and programming, and most of the bugs had been uncomfortably worked out of that over the last year and a half.

“Haggar,” was Lotor’s almost acidic response. “Honerva is dead.”

Adam was pretty sure Honerva would disagree, but he left it alone. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Lotor had yet to refer to his parents as “my mother” or “my father,” only by names or titles. He didn’t have to know details to sympathize with that habit, he knew the signs of an unhappy childhood all too well.

A man didn’t spend ten thousand years fighting against his own parents for no reason, and he didn’t refuse to trust allies with important information unless his trust had been terribly broken before. It didn’t excuse Lotor’s secrets about the rift gate, it was still his own fault everything had blown up in his face, but Adam understood the drive to keep those secrets.

“We’ll be crossing into the edges of the Quantum Abyss shortly,” Lotor announced. “We’ll be taking a roundabout route…and I hope you don’t have too many things you don’t want anyone to know, because the Abyss has the particular effect of revealing one’s past and future whether they want it to or not.”

“I’m sorry,” Adam didn’t think he’d heard right. He straightened up in his seat, immediately on guard. This had not been covered when preparing for their trip. “It does what? How? Nobody mentioned this.”

“The stars produce peculiar flares that create waves in already condensed time and space, pressing together things that have already happened with things that have yet to occur,” Lotor answered. “Our thoughts and memories are all just electric pulses, they’re easily affected. “The veil is thin here,” as the old prophets would have once said. Everything is so torn and folded in on itself here that you don’t have to be sensitive to quintessence to pick up the things it washes over you.”

“And you didn’t think it was necessary to bring this up before we left?” Adam demanded. “I do _not_ want you in my head!”

“And I did _not_ want to leave you behind on the Lorelia with the potential to be used against everyone by Haggar,” Lotor shot back. “Believe me, I have no interest in sharing anything with you either, but sometimes sacrifices must be made. I care more about that ship getting to its destination safely than about either of our feelings.”

“Jesus Christ,” Adam rubbed his temple, closing his eyes. This was the last thing he needed, especially if any of his conversations with Honerva surfaced. He began wishing he’d requested to borrow Acxa’s taser for the duration of the trip for “protection.” Now he might need to figure out a way to take Lotor down before he was ready. “How long are we stuck in here?”

“About a varga. There are shorter routes through the Abyss, but they tend to be patrolled by things with very large teeth.”

“Great.”

When Lotor said it wouldn’t be long, he wasn’t kidding. The change wasn’t gradual or unnoticeable, the warping was so pronounced even at its very edges that the black of space faded quickly into a rainbow of deep, foggy colors. The darkness faded away with the sudden appearance of stars, ones that had been invisible only moments ago due to space and light being folded around them.

Adam had to duck his head and shield himself with his arm to keep his nictitating membranes from closing on him, turning his seat sideways to look out the darker side of the viewscreen.

He could not deny that what he saw was eerily, breathtakingly beautiful. Planets seemed to hang in the sky in impossible bunches like whimsical mobiles, nebulae that should be invisible in the distance without computers to colorize them based on their elements were painted in rainbows of light. Stars that by the laws of physics shouldn’t have been able to exist in such proximity circled each other within only miles.

It was a place where physical laws ceased to exist, where the world seemed to do whatever it wanted. In the distance he saw something moving, small things that swam through space with wing-like fins as if it were the sea. Which was literally impossible, because Adam knew there was nothing in space to give any resistance for those wings to function. But they did.

“They’re pretty, but they’re dangerous,” Lotor warned, seeing where he was looking. “They can phase through metal if they like, get into the inner workings of ships and send them off course. Stray from the established paths even a little, and you end up sucked into one of the stars by their gravity. The whole Abyss is very beautiful, and just as deadly.”

There was a flash of light, and for a moment Adam was standing on what looked like the bridge of a ship. He saw Lotor a few yards away, seeming to be begging a pretty young Altean woman to listen, and a little further back other familiar faces. Young faces, looking angry, each wearing armor similar to the red and white that Lance had been wearing when they’d left the outpost. Lance in blue, Keith Kogane in red, Hunk Garrett in yellow, and Pidge Gunderson—or rather, Katie Holt—in green. And next to her was…

Adam blinked and he was back in the shuttle. He was gripping the armrests of his seat tightly, his nails digging into the material.

“What the _hell_ was that?” He demanded. No no no, he did not like this at all.

“The last moments of my stay on the Castle of Lions,” Lotor answered. “Get comfortable, they only get longer from here.”

Another flash and the shuttle disappeared again. He was standing in a dark corridor, all too familiar. A few feet away he saw himself, leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing heavily. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth from a fight, three very pissed off Galra surrounding him with weapons drawn. A fourth was pulling away the bodies of the two guards at his feet, one with her own knife slammed up through her chin into her head and the other with a broken neck. One of the Galra reached out to grab him by the prisoner’s uniform he wore and his eyes snapped open, a flurry of motion starting as he went down viciously fighting.

It was gone as quickly as it came, leaving him once again looking out the viewscreen at the pretty, dreamy colors. Beside him he saw Lotor shift out of the corner of his eye, turning his head ever so slightly to give him a sideways glance.

“They kept you stowed in the gladiator pits,” he noted.

“Mm. That was my first night in the prison block…I like to make dramatic entrances.”

This was a waking nightmare. It wasn’t like these were little flashes of memory, little visions without sound or context, these were completely immersive. But they weren’t like normal memories, seen from one person’s perspective, it was more like everything that had ever happened in the universe was all saved here with things being randomly displayed for a disembodied viewer based on who happened to be unlucky enough to be here.

But the shuttle was on a preprogrammed path through the Abyss, and there was nothing to do but sit here and try to ignore whatever played to the best of his ability. Adam sighed and put his head down on the console, unshielded, letting his membranes slide closed against the light.

* * * * *

The changing of the guard lasted only ten doboshes, that was the window of time when the retreating shift went in and the arriving shift was still preparing to come out. Only the midnight guard change afforded enough quiet for any chance of success, the only time when it was accompanied by a promising emptiness of the halls as people slept. Even out here in space, those who lived at the grand citadel that was Central Command ran their lives on a regular schedule.

The prison block first shift had just finished trailing out, save for the single guard that would remain as an overlap. He would stay, guarding the priority prisoners, until the second shift arrived and took over. He was a tall Galra, grim and imposing, but he went down as easy as anyone else with a taser set on the right level.

The slender form that had knocked him out moved like a shadow, dragging the body over and using the guard’s hand to open the cell block instead of his own, unwilling to leave any trail. As the door slid open he pulled the limp body with him, to keep it hidden from any passers by. He used the guard’s hand on the monitor here as well, activating the protocol that opened all of the cell doors in this block.

Only one had anyone in it. The interloper jogged quietly down to it, barely visible in the dark in his black armor and mask. He stopped in the cell doorway and looked down at the exhausted Galra sitting on the cell floor.

“You are Grendik?” The newcomer’s voice was mechanical, changed by the mask he wore. “The one who bombed the Galra base on Saurcrus and incited the rebellion?”

The man on the floor opened his eyes, looking blearily at the camouflaged soldier standing over him.

“Isn’t my execution supposed to be in the morning?” He asked. “And public? Is the great Emperor Zarkon frightened that I might manage to speak enough to change some minds before my head rolls?”

“I’m not here to kill you.” The soldier reached into a thigh pocket and pulled out a cloth, unwrapping a small tube. Careful not to touch its contents, he leaned forward and dispensed it on the sitting Galra’s neck, rubbing it in briefly with the cloth before both disappeared back into his pocket. “This is a stimulant. It will only work briefly, and you’ll likely be unconscious for a quintant afterward, but it will give you the strength to move.”

Starvation and sleep deprivation were preferred methods for keeping prisoners pliant here in the cell blocks, especially ones who had ways with words. But the stimulant did its job, and within a few moments Grendik was getting shakily to his feet. He towered over the soldier, who was likely an infiltrator from Saurcrus sent to set him free, and who had to support some of his weight as he limped on an injured leg.

They made it out of the cell block and about a hall away before alarms sounded, the second shift having arrived and found their prisoner gone. They hid briefly in a small alcove as some Galra guards ran passed then continued on, the soldier taking turns and choosing directions seemingly at random as they went. Still, he was lucky; they managed to avoid any patrols until they reached the loading dock.

This was where the soldier informed him a rebel sympathizer was waiting in a merchant ship to get him out of Central Command and safely out of Galra airspace. It was quiet here at this time of night, the only other person being a female Galra waiting by one of several merchant vessels. When she saw them she gave a hand signal to the soldier and disappeared into the ship, starting up the engines.

They were just about to the open ship doors when the search made it to the loading dock. The soldier threw Grendik down to the floor as blasters started going off, blocking a shot that would have killed the rebel with his own armored back. It was a mad scramble to get to the doors and onto the ship, but when Grendik looked back the soldier hadn’t followed.

He knelt on the ground, the back of his armor cracked and smoking. It had held up enough that the shot hadn’t killed him, but the red visible through the black revealed that he wasn’t escaping unscathed. In fact, he wasn’t escaping at all; the pilot had only been paid to take a rebel escapee and run, not engage in a battle. The door to the ship closed and it took off, leaving the soldier behind.

He didn’t seem terribly upset about this as he got back to his feet, looking around at the three Galra soldiers who surrounded him. In a flurry of deft movements one went down with a kick, the next with a shot from the blaster wrenched from the hands of the first to fall. The third went down after being slammed in the head with the blaster, and the soldier took off back down the hallway he’d originally come from.

He didn’t move around the edges of the Command to find another escape ship. Instead he moved toward the center, toward the column of residences surrounding the open space in the center of the citadel. Up the stairs several floors to avoid using his hand on the elevator pad, until he reached the secure residences and couldn’t go any further using the steps. Out through a maintenance shaft, to the empty void in the middle where there was nothing to save him if he slipped; the artificial gravity of the citadel would pull him downward until he hit the delicate artificial membrane that held in the atmosphere; he would slip easily out into open space, and that would be the end of him.

But there was nothing for it. He leapt from balcony to balcony, moving around the open core, climbing higher and higher. He was almost to his goal when the single alarm from down in the cell block now became the Command-wide alarm. The base’s lights began to flare on, floor by floor, threatening to chase away the shadows and leave him clearly visible. There were just a few more balconies, and then the leap of faith; the extra wide gap that separated one of the royal quarters from other residences.

He got a running start, sprinted, jumped. Missed, managed to grab the bottom edge of the balcony. With a pained grunt he scrabbled to pull himself up, barely managing to throw himself down to the floor of the balcony as the lights flashed on all around him.

Lotor rolled into the dim light of his room, ripping his mask off and throwing it under his bed. He could already hear voices outside of his door, his father questioning the guards outside as to whether or not he was in his room.

The door started to open. Lotor ran past the bed, grabbing a blanket from the top and pulling it over himself as he fell into the lounge in the corner. He picked up the first book on top of the nearby pile and flipped it open, careful to keep the armor he wore covered by the soft fabric. Schooling his face into innocence, the teen looked up as Emperor Zarkon stepped into the room.

“My lord?” He greeted. “How can I be of service at this hour?”

Zarkon said nothing at first. He looked around the room, slowly, and Lotor knew he suspected something was up. But he remained still, his head cocked to the side curiously, forcing his breathing to remain slow and even despite his burning lungs. Finally his father’s eyes came to rest on him.

“Dress,” Zarkon ordered. “The rebel leader has escaped and I will be addressing the citadel in fifteen doboshes. You will be there.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Zarkon left and Lotor threw off the blanket, running to lock the door. Heaving a sigh, he winced and limped through the other door to his bathroom, flipping on the lights and beginning to peel away the armor. He looked at his back in the mirror, burned and bleeding, and knew that he was about to go through hell.

There was nothing to be done, no one to ask for aid. He quickly tore up a shirt and wrapped his torso tightly, biting back his pain as he dressed. As he left the room he put on hist best haughty, indifferent expression and stepped stiffly out of the room, dutifully joining his father to be seen giving assurances that the missing rebel would be caught.

* * * * *

“Why can’t I go back?” The boy sounded desperate, as if the dorm room was a prison. “I don’t want to be here!”

“Because you need to be here,” the woman answered primly, ignoring his distress to inspect the the furnishings. “You wanted to train for the military and space exploration, the Galaxy Garrison is one of the premier academies.”

“I could go to a normal school at home and join the military after,” Adam answered dully, looking out the narrow windows, which barely opened enough to let in any fresh air on nice days. “They train you the same if you do it that way, you know.”

“No, you need to be here,” Janet repeated. “Away from Brazil.”

“I don’t want to be away from Brazil,” Adam complained. “I want to go _home_. I’ve been trapped in boarding schools since you locked me at St. Matthew’s when I was six, why can’t I go back to live with Grandmom and Grandpop? Why can’t I stay there and go to a regular school?”

“Don’t call them that,” Janet chastised, scrunching up her nose in distaste at the room. “Call them by their names.”

It was very no-frills, just two beds, two desks, and two closets. When Adam had said he wanted to join the military and fly, he had meant after he graduated high school. He hadn’t meant he should be forced to go from his painfully strict Catholic boys’ school to a literal military base at fourteen.

“I’m not going to call them Isabella and Lindolfo, that’s disrespectful. They’re my grandparents.”

“No, they’re not,” Janet said sharply, whipping around to pin him with a glare. “You’re not part of this family, do you understand me? Get that through your head, Adam. You want to talk about disrespectful? I chose to do the right thing and brought you into this world. I put you in the best schools, I give you anything you ask for, you have luxury living arrangements during break months, you have a trust fund to support you after you graduate…and you still fight me every chance you get. _That_ is disrespectful.”

“You have lawyers and your assistant do all that,” Adam said bitterly. “ _You_ visit once a year to make sure I don’t get uppity and start thinking I’m a person or something.”

“You’re not a person,” Janet snapped, curling her lip slightly. “You’re a curse.”

“Oh. Well,” Adam bristled. “Maybe you should’ve used better protection while you were fucking your way to the top of the corporate ladder, then.”

The sound of her hand hitting his face echoed loudly in the mostly empty room, the force of the slap throwing his head to the side. It took a moment for the pain to set in, for the skin to start growing warm where contact had been made. He felt a tickle above his lip and reached up to wipe it away, looking at the bit of blood on his fingertips before turning his gaze back to her.

“Wow…I guess the truth hurts, doesn’t it Janet?” He asked darkly.

She raised her hand as if she would hit him again, this time her fingers balled up into a fist. Adam stared right back at her, unflinching, daring her. He didn’t care if she hit him. What was the worst that could happen? Even if some freak accident happened where he fell back and hit his head and died, it wouldn’t matter. And if he didn’t die, it would hurt. So what? Who really gave a shit about a little bit of pain?

She didn’t hit him. She didn’t have the nerve and she never would. Instead she grabbed her purse from where it was sitting on the desk and stormed out of the room, slamming the door closed behind her. Adam dug through his suitcase for the pack of tissues he had in with his toiletries and cleaned the blood from his nose.

“Bitch,” he muttered under his breath.

While he was unpacking the door opened behind him to admit another boy and what sounded like his parents. Adam took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a second. When he turned around he pretended to just notice them and smiled, making sure he let it touch his eyes. It was the eyes that made smiles look real and smiles that pulled people in. He’d figured that out a long time ago.

“Hey!” He said brightly, pouring on the charm. “You’re Chris, right? I’m Adam. Looks like we’ll be roommates.”

* * * * *

The little boy looked down at the floor and tried not to fidget. He knew he was supposed to stand still with his head up high, but he didn’t like this room. It was big and open but always strangely empty, a cavernous space that left him feeling out in the open and vulnerable.

He wasn’t allowed to talk while he was here. He wasn’t allowed to move. Everyone who came through this room was Galra, tall and huge compared to him and he never felt safe, but he wasn’t allowed to show that. No matter how strong the urge to get away, he wasn’t allowed to leave.

His father sat in the great metal throne, taking his meetings with his generals one at a time or in small groups. They talked about a lot of things Lotor didn’t like hearing about, and they didn’t mince their words because of his presence.

They spoke with pride about the planets they conquered for the empire. They happily listed the dead at numbers that were unfathomable. Sometimes they dragged someone in, beaten and bleeding, who would inevitably beg for mercy and swear he or she knew nothing of value. The witch that was always at his father’s side would oblige his wishes and torture them, leave the room echoing with screams Lotor often heard in his nightmares, until there was nothing left but an empty shell with a mind that had been burned away.

The body would be hauled off, usually leaving a trail of red that had to be cleaned up by the servants. And then the day would continue in the same vein.

The officers who paraded in and out all day didn’t like him and Lotor knew it. They would enter and bow to the emperor with the utmost respect, but almost always their eyes would flick to the child standing at his side. There was always an instant before they were able to control their expression when their disgust showed, when they were unable to hide their distaste at the fact that the throne room was being defiled by the presence of a mystery halfbreed.

Lotor was more empathetic than most Galra, it was fairly easy for him to get a sense of what the people around him were thinking or feeling. So he knew, when Zarkon tensed on his throne, that he was irritated at that slight instant of disrespect. And he also knew it wasn’t the Galra officers his father was irritated with. It was Lotor, who had been born small and soft and docile, who was everything the Galra were not, who was an embarrassment to the empire.

Every sneer and scowl was a mark against Lotor, not the men and women judging him. Lotor was young, but he understood this. And he understood this was simply the way things were.

A soldier arrived and knelt before Zarkon, dipping his head down low.

“Sire, your audience is requested in the Kandar Wing.”

Lotor raised his eyes. It wasn’t often Zarkon left the Citadel center, and Lotor was never allowed to leave it. The only people he ever saw were the servants or the guards who roamed the base center, he yearned for the chance to see more than the same four walls.

“Father, may I accompany you?” He requested hopefully. If he was just standing by silently, surely it didn’t matter where he did it.

“You will stay here.”

“But I want to join you!” Lotor protested as Zarkon rose. There was nothing in the Kandar Wing except more soldiers, it wasn’t like there was anything he could ruin. And he’d been studying tirelessly so he could prove he could useful, he just needed the chance. “I have learned much of our—”

“You are an insolent boy,” Zarkon cut him off, pinning him with a glare. “You may be the prince, but I am your emperor.”

Of course. Zarkon was not his father, Zarkon was his emperor. He didn’t like it when Lotor forgot that, when he addressed him in a way that was too familiar. He had no standing in the emperor’s eyes, he was just something kept around to fill the space of ‘heir.’ Emperor Zarkon didn’t plan on dying anytime soon, maybe not ever, he didn’t need an heir. Lotor was simply a pointless formality who angered everyone by daring to be a living thing with feelings.

He saluted crisply, nodding respectfully. As Zarkon turned to leave Lotor’s eyes shifted upward again, to his retreating back. They narrowed with anger.

Lotor didn’t like Zarkon, at all. But he couldn’t stop himself from loving his father, and that was a weakness he hated himself for.

A soft purr drew his gaze down to a small animal rubbing up against his leg, and Lotor momentarily forgot his frustrations. He had never seen such a thing, at least not in the citadel. There were animals in books of course, and he could name quite a few of them, but he’d never come across anything that would be so unafraid of him.

He crouched down, looking at the wide-eyed little creature in curiosity. It looked soft, and he reached out to pet it.

“Do not touch him. He will hurt you.”

Lotor had forgotten Zarkon’s witch was in the room. He couldn’t stand Haggar, she was just as violent as his father and it was with her unquestioning support that he continued the brutal fashion of his reign. Many of the things he did were made possible by her magic, and if Lotor had been able he would have slain her a hundred times by now.

But he was interested in the animal, so he lowered himself to speaking to her even as he ignored her and pet him anyway.

“What’s his name?”

“He has no name.”

Of course. Lotor would have rolled his eyes if he were alone, but there were still a handful of guards and he needed to keep up some sense of decorum. Everything with the witch and her druids was stupidly overdramatic, of course she’d pick up a sweet, domestic beast and then not even bother to give him a proper name.

“Then I shall name him,” Lotor decided, scratching the animal behind the ears. He pressed his head up into the boy’s hand, continuing to purr. “Your name shall be…”

He tried to think of something noble and strong. The animal was beautiful, and so friendly, it deserved something fitting.

“Kova,” Haggar interrupted his thoughts. “His name is Kova.”

Lotor managed not to roll his eyes again. From no name to suddenly having a name, if she hadn’t wanted to tell him she should have just said so. Kova wasn’t any kind of Galran name, it actually sounded somewhat Altean, so he wasn’t terribly surprised the genocidal wench didn’t use it.

Kova jumped up on Lotor’s shoulders, rubbing against the side of his face and tickling him with his fur. Lotor couldn’t help but smile, enjoying the loud purrs.

“This creature pleases me. It will be mine,” he informed Haggar. Kova was clearly starved for affection, eating up every bit of attention given to him. Lotor would be damned if he would allow the animal to continue to suffer the negligence that the Galra were prone to offer.

“My Lord…” Haggar said plaintively.

Something snapped in him when she said those words. How dare she use that tone? Act as if she were being put upon or tormented somehow? She, who so blithely caused agony and suffering daily without a second thought, now she was going to act like him taking her pet was the ultimate punishment? He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she tortured the animal when she was angry or bored, Haggar was a thoroughly terrible person and she deserved no consideration.

“You may be the high priestess, but I am your prince,” this time it was Lotor who cut off Haggar. If she was going to support a ruler who walked all over his people, then she could suffer the same indignity when he walked all over her. He would not let her be immune to behavior she encouraged. “And you will do what I say. Isn’t that right, Kova?”

Kova purred again, and Haggar gave up the fight.

“Yes, my lord.”

Lotor scratched Kova behind the ear again, pulling the animal down from his shoulder and into his arms. Emperor Zarkon would likely be busy for some time, he was no longer needed in the throne room.

“I’m finished here,” he said firmly, leaving the dais. “I will return tomorrow as normally required.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Lotor left the throne room, stepping out into the dark metal halls of the inner citadel. He pet Kova thoughtfully as he walked, feeling a tiny little thrill. That had been the first time he’d dared talk back to the high priestess, the first time he’d dared talk back to any adult at all. She had buckled, barely fought him at all, and all he had to do was remind her of his title.

Maybe he wasn’t loved. Maybe he wasn’t cared for. Maybe he wasn’t even liked.

But in that title he had _power_.

“I need to stop feeling sorry for myself,” Lotor murmured to Kova, setting the animal down as he walked toward his room. To his pleasure, the little creature followed willingly. “If no one else will stand up to them, then someday I have to. We need to focus, Kova…the Galra way is wrong, we need to find a new way. A better way.”

He opened the door to his room, letting Kova go in first and closing it up behind him. He locked it, not wanting to be disturbed as he went to the console at his desk and began filtering through the many thousands of books at his disposal in the system. Many species had been purged from the universe by the Galra expansion, but their knowledge still remained, archived in case it could be of use at some point in the future. It was to these reference texts that he went, knowing they would be sanitized and cleaned of anything even remotely critical of Galra rule, incomplete at best.

But they would still have some technical knowledge, things like fighting techniques and native foods and medicinal texts. Lotor began downloading files on staff and sword fighting, martial arts, and basic first aid to start. It would take time to master even the basics since he would be working by himself, but dedicating the time to this was better than wasting it being just a necessary technicality.

Emperor Zarkon and Haggar didn’t think he knew about his heritage, didn’t think him bright enough to figure it out. But he liked to read and he liked to learn, and all it took was a single description of a person like him in an Olkarian reference to set him searching. They thought they’d erased all traces of his people, that there was nothing out there for him to find, but there was information out there that had survived the purge simply by lacking the right keywords to be found.

It would take him some time to gather those sources, and there was likely information he would only find by scouring the galaxies for hard copies. But for now he would stop trying to be like the oppressors he was surrounded with and begin to work toward his own strengths, until he was free to travel and search out the knowledge he really wanted.

If he wasn’t Galran enough to be accepted by this empire, then he would simply have to become Altean enough to someday crush it.

* * * * *

The boy was a runner. He could barely walk and he was already everywhere he could get into, which was why he was already up and moving when he heard the singing.

Adam was quite small still, old enough to talk but still nonverbal in a way that worried his grandparents. He hummed a lot, eschewing words for melodies even though he seemed to understand most of what was said to him just fine.

But people talked, they didn’t sing. So when he heard the singing, he wanted to sing back.

His grandparents were asleep when he climbed out of the crib—something he’d learned to do early on but they’d never found a way to trap him in there—and he had been in the small kitchen playing with the fluffy white cat when he heard it. And he was still small enough to discover he could crawl through the dog door nearby, out into the warm early summer night.

The sky was clear and the stars were bright, lighting his way as he toddled down the hill the house sat on. He moved on unsteady little feet, following the sound to the dock that stretched out into the wide river. The water was serene and sparkling, the moving currents rippling the surface just enough to let the light shine off it like a sea of faceted crystals.

There was some splashing down in the water, which wasn’t unusual since fish sometimes jumped at night. Not that a toddler would know the difference either way, all he was interested in was the fact that there were noises he liked and he was curious. He made it about halfway down the dock before he tripped and fell, then gave up and simply crawled the rest of the way.

As he peeked over the edge of the dock, the singing stopped and there was a splashing sound. He looked around but couldn’t see anyone, so he did what he usually did to get his grandparents’ attention: he hummed. He didn’t know enough about the concept of communicating to try and copy the song he’d heard, he just made sounds he felt were pleasant.

The girl who came up out of the water after a few moments seemed as curious as he was. She was probably about ten or eleven and very pale with dark hair, and was joined by a boy about the same age with a similar appearance. Adam liked their eyes; they were a shiny gold color.

The girl hummed at him, copying his sounds, and he hummed back. She and the boy seemed to think that was funny, and repeated the sounds. Adam gleefully played their game, too young to know that the long, sharp canine teeth that showed when the kids smiled were a very big red flag. When the girl held out a hand for him to take Adam did so happily, until he found himself pulled down into the water.

It was a moment of panic, unable to breath as he was pulled down into the dark, not knowing what he was supposed to do. He didn’t really have any concept of time, so it might as well have been forever before he felt hands grip his waist and pull him upward until his head broke the surface.

Adam coughed and sputtered as arms wrapped around him, cradling him against a damp chest as the man moved to the shore and stepped up out of the river. He sat on the edge of the dock with the little boy in his lap, gently patting his back as he coughed up water. It took a few minutes before Adam’s nose stopped burning, and he was now very unhappy with his new friends.

The man holding him had darker skin than the others, and metallic bronze hair that didn’t seem to hold water and was already dry. When he spoke to the kids in the water it wasn’t really speech…more like soft clicks and little musical noises. But these only punctuated his real words, which were spoken using signs with his hands.

What he said seemed to horrify the two younger Nixa, and the girl climbed up on the dock to kneel next to Adam. She pushed his head to the side a bit roughly, running her hands over his neck in search of something. When she didn’t find it she touched the gills at her own neck and then seemed to question the man as to why Adam had none.

There was no satisfactory answer. He just didn’t. The girl checked the little boy’s mouth and didn’t find the proper teeth, either. His skin was strangely porous, and his hair had gotten _wet_. Nor did he have the appropriate claws at his fingertips for gripping meals, just little flat fingernails. The only thing he had to prove he belonged to a member of the pod were his looks, the brown skin and bronzy hair and gold-toned eyes. The pretty face strongly resembled the male holding him, but that was all. Just looks. The little boy would never survive in the water.

The three remained for several hours, until the little boy became sleepy. The man carried him up to the house and urged him back inside, where he curled up and fell asleep next to the cat to be found in the morning.

They came often. Sometimes it was just the man, sometimes he had two or three or four younger Nixa with him. Sometimes there were other adults. The adults all shared similar features, as any extended family would, but the children differed in many ways. The younger girl and boy had that pale white skin that seemed almost unnatural. Another girl had pointed ears and white eyes with no visible pupil or iris. Another boy had bony crests along the top of his head, twined into his hair like decorations, and dark stripes on his skin.

If he had been older, Adam might have questioned the differences. He might have wondered why there were children that were clearly all from mixed species coupling but no parents besides the Nixa ones. He might have understood that these children had been born along the nomadic pod’s travel route and taken along to be raised by their people. He might have suspected that the reason they were here was because they had tracked him down to collect him.

And he might have understood that they were distressed, because all of their children were built to survive in the waters that were their natural habitat but Adam was _not_. He wasn’t built to live in the kind of places they needed to go.

He wasn’t built for a lot of things. His throat was made for human speech, no matter how the little boy tried to copy the lilting songs of the others they always seemed to fall flat. He didn’t have the same hunger for the treats the other kids offered him after playing a game of seeing who could catch the most small fish with one hand. He mostly just sat on the dock, being held by one of the adults or splashing in the water when they took him in the shallows.

The one constant of the visits was the man, who was always the first to scoop him up when he sneaked out of the house. He was the one who brought Adam into the water and taught him how to swim, and the one who taught him to say a few words in their native clicking sounds. He often brought gifts, pretty shells or shark teeth or little pieces of underwater fossil, always things that Adam’s grandparents could write off as something he found while they were letting him play in the yard.

The final visit didn’t come from the water. Adam was old enough to reach the door latch if he stretched now, strong enough to press it without help and let himself out onto the porch. He still didn’t talk very much but he had long since learned to walk, and he followed the familiar song at a happy run that took him along the dark road and past the neighbor’s house.

He was too young to understand much, but he knew as soon as he reached them that something was wrong. They were all there, together, unusually quiet and somber, and when _his_ man picked him up and hugged him it was almost uncomfortably tight.

Adam didn’t know the words that came with it, these little clicks and soft whistles were unfamiliar, but he knew that they were sad. They meant something bad, something very bad, and they made him very uncomfortable. He held on tightly, clinging to the jacket the man wore today, very different from other nights. They all tended to wear wetsuits or similar to stop drag in the water from fabric, now they were dressed to hide their identifying features from strangers they would be coming into contact with.

They were dressed to _leave_.

Tonight, the man didn’t take him down to the dock. They went further along the road with the group, to a place where the trees were thick, and they sat at the base of one. Adam cuddled close, the arms wrapped tightly around him not assuaging his fear that this night was going to be a bad night.

They all sat close, they all talked to him. He knew the wavy hand sign that meant ‘sea,’ he had always liked their stories about the sea even if he only understood parts. They talked about the sea a lot and they talked about the stars, and they pointed out a particular spot in the night sky for him to look at. He had no idea what any of that meant.

The time dripped by and the conversation dwindled, and eventually Adam started to doze. The man picked him up and carried him back down the road, hesitating for a moment before taking the risk of approaching the house. The door was still unlocked from Adam’s exit, he carried the boy inside and stalked quietly up the stairs, searching until he found the room where the crib had recently been exchanged for a small bed.

He tucked Adam in, sitting quietly on the edge of the bed, petting his hair until he fell asleep. Before he left he took off the necklace he wore hidden under his shirt, laying the silver chain with its little water-filled pendant inside an open box of shells by the bed where the adults in the house would assume it was just another found treasure. He left quietly, locking the door behind him and disappearing into the night.

The songs stopped after that. There were no more faces greeting him from the water anymore, no more gifts or nights being held down by the docks. And in the way of all young children growing older, the memories drifted off with nothing to anchor them, and Adam simply forgot.

* * * * *

“What happened here?”

Lotor looked up from the viewscreen, to the Silenian ensign who stood beside him. The bug-like man was looking in horror at the image on the screen, the barely-recognizable collection of rocks that five decaphoebs ago had been a thriving, productive planet.

“A failure,” he answered, looking back to the screen.

“The people of this planet were too welcoming of the opportunity to work side by side with the Galra,” another voice behind them said coldly. “Their reward was their destruction.”

Sarchinne, one of the half-Galra members of the crew, came to stand on the Silenian’s other side. She tucked a few stray strands of bright red hair behind her ear and looked down at their newest crew member.

“There are good people in the Galra empire,” she told him. “But if you ever see a Galran soldier with the Emperor’s insignia, run. They’re little more than animals.”

The Silenian nodded and left the viewscreen to return to his console, unable to look any longer. Sarchinne folded her hands behind her back and sighed, her shoulders drooping in sadness at what she was looking at. Like the other four half-Galra members of Lotor’s personal team, she was far more reasonable and prone to actually displaying emotion than their fullblood counterparts.

“There are good people within the Emperor’s army as well,” Lotor noted, not looking away from the destroyed planet. “There are good people everywhere.”

“No, there are people who think they’re good everywhere,” Sarchinne answered. “Good people don’t follow orders to kill and enslave just because they’re too scared to open their mouths. Good people rebel.”

Lotor didn’t respond. He continued to watch the uneventful image of destruction in silence, and eventually Sarchinne left him to continue with her duties. In time he was joined by Norin, another half-Galra on his team.

“Ready for the space walk,” Norin informed him. “Scanners are prepped and I have specimen boxes ready to go down in the airlock.”

Lotor nodded and finally turned away from the screen. He left the bridge of the small cruiser and made his way to his tiny Captain’s quarters to change into his space suit. It was a far cry from the luxurious suites of the Central Command citadel, but it was his and he was king here. The small bunk built into the wall was all he really needed for sleeping, and if he needed a desk there was a tabletop up flat against the wall that folded down. Under it was a small storage space with a lock where he could keep anything of value.

He opened the lock and took out a small box, sitting on the edge of his bunk to balance it on his knees. Opening it carefully, he revealed the soft fabric lining hugging the crystal cube within to keep it safe.

Lotor lifted the cube from its nest and held it up to the light, looking at the etching within that was so fine it was invisible unless viewed from exactly the right angle. The colorless image of himself, gazing lovingly at the woman held in his arms. He didn’t need color to remember the vivid purple of Ven’tar’s eyes or the faint yellow tint of her pale skin. The gold of her hair, and the delicate marks on her beautiful face.

He closed his eyes and hugged the small crystal against his chest, the only physical proof that the woman named Ven’tar had ever existed. She was gone, burned in the massacre of her people that had destroyed every trace of them. There were no ruins, no homage to the past remained here, everything had been wiped away in a single act of evil.

He had tried. His entire life, Lotor had resisted being indoctrinated into the cult of violence that was the Galra imperial inner circle, he had clung to the part of himself that was _other_ , refusing to let himself be poisoned. He had searched and studied, found whatever traces he could, any scraps of information, regarding his mother’s people and their ways.

Lotor had fought violence with compassion, naively believing that strength of character meant something in the face of strength of force. And he had lost.

Because it wasn’t about what worked best. It wasn’t about what benefited the people. It wasn’t even about meeting the needs of a growing empire.

It was about inflicting pain…just because they could.

Lotor opened his eyes, setting the crystal down on the bed so he could change into his space suit. He finished quickly and tucked the little cube into one of his belt pouches, grabbing his helmet and going to join the others. Norin, Sarchinne, and Tegur were already there waiting.

“Keep an eye on your monitors,” Lotor ordered as they closed the inner airlock door and prepared to step out of the ship. “A lot of quintessence was harvested here, there were bound to be some leaks. If you even suspect you’ve been exposed get back to the ship immediately.”

“Try to make sure your samples are big enough to use but not brittle,” Norin followed up as the outer airlock opened, grabbing the sample boxes he’d laid out and passing them around. “It will probably be like we saw with previous planets, most of what’s floating here is just barely held-together dust. We need samples that will survive being broken down in pieces and put through the scanners.”

Lotor took one of the boxes and stepped out into open space, letting himself be carried forward initially by the force of his jump. He took those first moments to glance around at the rubble in real time, rather than through the electronics of a viewscreen.

It was a thousand times worse when it was reality instead of just a picture.

He didn’t bother to check his scanner, he didn’t need to. Unlike the others he had found that quintessence exposure didn’t make him ill in high concentrations, something that would undoubtedly be useful to look into one day when he had more than just a tiny cruiser at his disposal. Being banished from the empire was freeing, but also left him at the mercy of limited resources.

Lotor used his boosters to go further out from the ship, ignoring the general protocols that said to stay nearby. As the Captain he could do as he wished, and he was willing to risk himself in a way he wasn’t willing to risk his crew. Not that there was any use in going further, it would be the same in one place as it was in another, it was just his stupid hopes whispering to him that maybe, just maybe, this time there would be something left.

There wasn’t.

There was nothing here to even indicate this had ever been a planet, let alone a beautiful one filled with vibrancy and life. The winding rivers, the towering trees, the delicate flowers, they might as well have been something he’d made up in his head. It was only empty rock here, all life had been scorched away in a merciless cataclysm.

Lotor used his boosters to slow himself, coming to a stop. He looked around at the desolation around him and he felt his chest constrict.

They had stood here while it happened. Maybe not in this exact spot, but those people had stood on the rubble that had once been the surface of the planet. Ven’tar had stood here, engulfed in the inferno along with millions of other lives.

Had she suffered? Had she called for him? Perhaps thought in her last moments that he had abandoned her for the sake of his throne, unaware that he lay unconscious on the observation deck and able to do nothing?

God, he was tired. Every part of him was exhausted and screaming for rest, his heart was broken into a thousand pieces and the soul he’d vowed never to sell for power felt weak and crushed. He had fought this war his entire short life, first for his own salvation and then for that of the enslaved galaxy, and he had _lost_. He didn’t even know what he was doing anymore, traveling between destroyed planets and taking samples as if he might magically find some answer as to what he could do to stop it.

But he couldn’t stop it, because he was only one person. He was one remaining Altean in a universe empty of hope, all he dreamed of anymore was being at rest with his mother’s people instead of struggling to tread water in this raging, merciless hell.

Lotor took the little crystal out of his pocket and held it up toward the system’s sun in the distance, one last look at Ven’tar before he tossed it in the direction of the star. Space being space, it would travel unchecked until it reached the sun’s field of gravity, and it would be pulled in. The last physical proof of his absolute failure, gone.

He watched the cube spin as it moved, glinting in the reflected light as he reached up to unclip his helmet. He hesitated for a moment then closed his eyes and breathed out to empty his lungs, pushing the helmet away and letting it float out of reach. A vacuum was a friendly thing, making the body burn oxygen faster and pulling away consciousness quickly. It was barely fifteen ticks before Lotor felt his awareness slip blissfully away.

It didn’t last.

Lotor woke up on the single gurney in the cruisers little medical bay, feeling as if he’d been run over by a striker. Opening his eyes and finding himself in safety had never felt so absolutely desolate. If he couldn’t live in peace, couldn’t he at least die in peace?

“Good morning,” Tegur’s voice sounded from down by his feet, where she was looking at his readings on a scanner. “Well that was a nasty little accident, wasn’t it? Looks like your helmet clasps malfunctioned.”

“Unfortunate,” Lotor murmured, his throat and mouth dry as he tiredly sat up.

“Very,” Tegur agreed. “But it happens a lot with half-Galra, I guess we’re just unlucky. I had a blaster I was holding malfunction once, it got me clear through the chest. But my hand jerked to the side when it fired and I lived long enough to get treated, so here I am. Come on, up. You were in the healing pod for half a quintant, you need to move around and eat.”

Lotor glanced over at her as he got up, and in spite of her impassive expression he knew she was aware of what had happened and was sparing him from accusations. But she wasn’t one for heart-to-heart talks—none of them were—so he didn’t respond to the concern that was hidden under the pretense. It was hard being considered a halfbreed and an outsider, psychologically scarring once the full blood Galra were done with them, and Tegur wasn’t wrong. About half of known half-Galran deaths were documented as being self-inflicted.

That she had attempted it at some point wasn’t surprising. He would be more shocked to find out at least one other member of the crew hadn’t, statistically speaking.

Tegur instructed him to have a full bottle of water and eat at least half a meal, then let him leave the medical bay. Lotor immediately ignored all of her instructions and instead headed toward the back of the ship, to his little quarters where he could lock the door and not have to face anyone.

He stripped off his space suit and fell into his bunk, staring up at nothing and wondering where he was supposed to find the strength to keep going.

* * * * *

The beginning of the school year was always difficult, and not just for the students. The handful of teaching staff who were also current active soldiers had to adjust to the addition of classes, office hours, and grading time to schedules already filled with rigorous physical training and full time military duties. Adam was tired as he parked in the faculty lot and climbed out of his Jeep, and he looked it.

He smoothed down his uniform and grabbed the messenger bag from the passenger seat, and started the trek across the lot and into the main building. It was still early, he had about half an hour before he had to go to his office and start preparing for classes, but the lobby was filled with far more people than was normal for a Thursday morning in September.

Half-asleep, Adam tried to remember if he’d completely forgotten to bring his travel mug of coffee at all ,or if he’d put it on top of his Jeep when he’d left and damned it to a fate of being splattered across the interstate. The one certainty was that he didn’t have any coffee and that he needed some, and the second certainty was that if one more person slammed into him in their rush to run around he was going to punch somebody in the throat.

“Adam!”

He had to look around before he spotted Curtis over by the elevators, motioning for him to come quickly. Adam waved him off, gesturing to the doorway past the front desk that led down a hall to the cafeteria.

“I need coffee first, give me a sec!”

He started to push past the crowd but Curtis whistled, a high-pitched sound he knew drove Adam nuts and did when he wanted his attention immediately.

“Now, Captain Wolfe!”

_Shit_. _What did I do?_

The title didn’t come out all the time, but it came out often enough when he was being called for discipline. Adam knew better than to ignore it even when it was being used by a friend, he was a soldier first and he knew when he had to draw the line between treating someone as a friend and treating them as a superior officer.

“Yes, sir!” He responded obediently, turning to go as called.

“ _—kashi Shirogane, Samuel Holt, and Matthew Holt. The crash is thought to have occurred in the early morning hours—_ ”

Adam stopped as the noise of the crowd quieted just long enough for him to hear the TV by the reception desk. He forgot about Curtis, turning back to push a handful of milling airmen and privates with nothing better to do out of his way. He made it to the desk and leaned against it, looking up at the news broadcast that showed the staff photos of the Kerberos crew with a ticker under it announcing “breaking news.”

“ _Initial reports indicate the crash was caused by pilot error with one unnamed source citing that Captain Shirogane’s youth, which initially made his flight to Kerberos so record-breaking, caused the disaster due to his inexperience with deep space flight_ ,” the newswoman delivered the information in a neutral voice, unaffected by what she saw simply as a story that would bring ratings. “ _The Galaxy Garrison has yet to issue a formal statement on the loss of the expedition or on the extent to which the pilot might be at fault, with a representative saying only that Admiral Sanda’s deepest sympathies go out to the families of the three crew members who so regrettably lost their lives_.”

The report segued into an overview of the Kerberos mission statement, and information on the individual crew members and the shuttle model they were using, but Adam wasn’t listening. He just stood there, staring at the screen without blinking, as if he were looking right through it. Curtis finally reached him, taking him by the arm and pulling him back through the sea of people.

“I wanted to get to you before you saw that,” Curtis frowned as the elevator doors closed to leave them in quiet. Adam didn’t answer him. “Someone leaked the story early, it wasn't supposed to break until this afternoon. I’m sorry. I know they’re dragging him through the dirt…and it’ll probably get worse when all the channels start competing for ratings on the story.”

“It wasn’t the pilot,” Adam mumbled. “If that thing crashed it was a mechanical problem.”

“I know. We all know.”

The elevator doors opened on the second floor, where it was much quieter but there were still people milling around. Adam didn’t pay much attention, Curtis had to take his arm again and lead him down a hallway to where several officers were speaking. Commander Iverson saw them coming and excused himself, letting them into his office.

Adam stood outside the doorway. Curtis had to pull him in, lead him to a chair, and push him down to sit before taking the chair next to him.

Somebody talked, maybe Curtis or maybe Iverson. Adam didn’t know, he was only vaguely aware of noises coming out of someone’s mouth. He stared at the surface of Iverson’s desk, at the big, flat calendar there with meetings and appointments scribbled all over it, not really seeing it. Eventually he shut down and stopped registering that there were noises at all, just stopped thinking entirely.

When he zoned back in it was to find himself lying on the floor of Iverson’s office with Curtis kneeling beside him, holding one of his hands. He’d been laid out with someone’s jacket folded up under his head, and a med tech was leaning over him.

“Looks like he’s coming out of it,” she announced. “Someone should take him home.”

“What the hell was that?” Iverson asked from somewhere behind them.

“Looks like catatonia,” the med tech answered, shining a small light in Adam’s eyes. “A lot of things can cause it and he should have a psych eval for a more definitive answer, but he’s the one who had the accident a few years ago right? All of the talk about the crash on the news might have triggered it.”

Adam made a small noise and Curtis helped him sit up. It was Iverson’s jacket under his head as it turned out, and he had no idea how long he’d been in this office let alone on the floor. He didn’t even remember coming upstairs.

He was still less than receptive to what was going on around him, but it was more an intentional refusal to pay attention now. He didn’t want to know what was happening, he didn’t want to acknowledge the news. He could never unhear it and he could never unknow the fact that Takashi was dead, but he could push it to the side and ignore it for the sake of his sanity.

Iverson instructed Curtis to take him home, and they made a stop at Curtis’ office. While the other soldier was inside closing down shop for the day Adam felt a slight pain in his palm and realized he was holding something tightly. He opened his hand to find Takashi’s dog tag there, probably given to him at some point during the forgotten conversation with Iverson.

Adam pushed away from the wall where he was leaning and left. He didn’t have his messenger bag and had no idea where he’d left it, but the keys to his Jeep were in his pocket. He zoned out again as soon as he was behind the wheel, making the drive on ingrained memory alone. Not to his new apartment building north of the Garrison but south, to the apartment he’d shared with Takashi after graduation.

He still had a key, not so that he could ever come back but in case the landlord wanted him to let someone in for maintenance before Takashi returned from Kerberos. The apartment was just the way he’d left it when he’d come back the week after the launch and moved all of his things to his new place.

Adam hadn’t touched Takashi’s room when he left, but that was where he went now. He locked the apartment door and wandered in a daze down the hall, to the first closed door on the left.

This was where Takashi had lived, it was where he had intended to remain living after the mission. All of his things were still here, his posters still on the walls and his clothes still in the dresser. He had stripped the sheets off the bed before he’d left, undoubtedly due to their activities the night before the launch, but everything else was the same.

Adam trudged over to the bed, dropping the keys on the floor halfway there. He fell down onto the mattress, curling around a pillow, and stared off into space.

His phone began ringing off the hook within an hour but he didn't hear it. It died eventually, so he didn’t know how long he was there. He slept a lot, and although he gradually got thirsty he ignored it. He stayed where he was, completely uninterested in anything having to do with movement, until Gail and Curtis found him there three days later.

* * * * * * * * * *

The visions and flashes subsided gradually as the shuttle moved into the shadow of a planet. It was tidally locked, the recovery dome on its surface blocked from the star’s waves by the large planet’s bulk. The moon where the medical facility was situated revolved around the planet at exactly the same rate it revolved around the sun, resulting in it being completely and permanently blocked from the star’s waves as well.

It was an impossible setup found within an impossible place, the kind of thing that would have made Earth’s theoretical physicist’s heads explode.

Lotor and Adam were both silent as the facility came into view below, a domed base built into the moon’s surface in a way that made it almost blend in completely. There was a runway they approached and then glided along, up to a point where the shuttle’s short-distance comms were finally able to lock onto the doors for Lotor to send a signal and open them. They landed in a dark docking bay, dim landing lights beginning to come on automatically as the air locks closed behind them.

Lotor powered down the shuttle, and finally broke the silence.

“I apologize. If I had known, I wouldn’t have spoken so flippantly.”

“It’s fine,” Adam answered, throwing off his harness once they were still and making a beeline for the shuttle doors. This ship suddenly felt too small and crowded, he needed space. He needed air.

“Wait,” Lotor followed him, a bit behind as he had to stop to fiddle with his harness to get it off. “There’s something we really should talk about before you go out there.”

“No, I’m good,” Adam insisted as he stepped out of the shuttle and took a look around the dimly lit docking bay, starting to get as far away from the vessel as he could. It wasn’t big enough to hold a ship the size of the Lorelia, but could definitely handle smaller runners. “I’m not really a talker.”

“Adam,” Lotor finally got himself loose and made it to the shuttle door. “Seriously, we need to discuss—”

The brighter spotlights up in the ceiling suddenly turned on, momentarily blinding Adam as he stupidly looked upward. It took him a moment to adjust so that his membranes would withdraw, and by the time they did there was a door opening at the top of some stairs against the wall and a man was walking down the metal steps.

“Hey, you are still alive!” The man called cheerfully to Lotor as he reached the bottom of the stairs and approached. “And I was just about to start redecorating the place to my own tastes.”

Adam stopped dead, and for a moment he wondered if he’d had a stroke. The height was the same, the build was the same, and the completely black hair was the same texture though it was actually in a neat style as opposed to a military buzz cut. The mannerisms and speech were different, but the voice was definitely the same.

And although he wasn’t completely identical, showing about ten extra years of age in the form of laugh lines and lacking in any scars, there was no mistake that he was looking at the face of an actual adult Takashi Shirogane.

“Kuro,” Lotor greeted as he finally reached them, gripping the back collar of Adam’s flight suit as if to stop him from hitting the floor if he passed out. “This is Adam. Adam, this is Kuro. And in light of what’s come up in the last varga, this is decidedly more awkward than I’d expected.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I'm alive. I know I've said before I work full time, and classes for the spring semester start on Monday so this last week has been a bit hectic. I'm hoping to get back on a faster updating schedule, fingers crossed!
> 
> I've seen in the comments that there are occasionally questions about something I wasn't clear about. I think I'm probably going to start answering those questions on my tumblr, which is @little-red-pencil. Asks are also always open there and anonymous asking is allowed, I know there are probably plenty of things I haven't been clear about so far. My bad, and I'm happy to try to clear them up!

The Black Lion dropped out of hyperspace to find nothing at the coordinates where it had picked up the tracking signal, only a dark expanse of nothing and radio silence. Keith wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all, they were now several days out from Earth with nothing to show for it but a couple of weapons picked up at the outpost’s remains.

It was a good thing they’d learned early on to keep the Lions stocked with provisions for these types of emergencies, if they’d had to stop and add additional hours to their journey to pick up supplies he would probably have gone mad by now. As it was, Keith already only had a very slim grip on the ability to remain reasonable.

Voltron had fought and destroyed some of the most dangerous enemies in the known universe. The team had liberated galaxies, destroyed entire enemy fleets, turned the tides of war against imperial oppressors. And yet Keith couldn’t manage to track down and bring home one specific human target.

He pulled up the navigation overlay and tried three times to input the commands to calculate a projected flight path. The error that kept coming up when he put in wrong parameters pushed him further into frustration, with a touch of anger at himself for his shortcomings. He could punch in coordinates and follow a calculated route, but for things needing manual calculation he always relied on Pidge and Hunk. He could fly better than most, but he’d always been bad at math and he’d only barely scraped by a passing grade in physics.

And looking back, that might have only been a favor from Adam to Shiro, given how often Keith had skipped the class to avoid the teacher.

Black would tell him where to go, if he told Black what he was looking for. But Keith only had the most basic grasp on the idea that the tracking signal had probably taken hours to first reach them and that the source had moved since then, he couldn’t figure out how to convey that into the system with numbers.

_This is why pilots have to actually graduate school_ , he thought dully. _Being able to dodge asteroids isn’t so useful right now, is it?_

Keith punched the console. All he did was hurt his hand on the hard metal, and get a faint flash of disapproval from his Lion.

He let his head fall forward against his console, wondering how they’d gotten to this point. Well, not really wondering, Keith knew how they’d ended up here; his inability to open up had gotten them into this mess. His habit of being closed off had left Lance unable to trust him enough to open up to him again, and had led directly to him hiding what was wrong for so long.

Keith knew that if he’d just let down some of his walls and engaged his team as friends more, that information would have come to light sooner. Lance would have never gotten to the point of leaving the team, because the rest of them would have pooled their brain power and figured out what was going on with his seizures sooner. Acxa would never have been able to separate one of them from the group, Lance and James and Romelle would still be safe on Earth.

How a leader acted really did matter. Shiro had never had these problems when he’d been leading the team, he’d always been open and inviting. And it wasn’t like the older Paladin didn’t have his own scars, he had been fresh out of being a Galra captive and still did his best to try and look out for their emotional well being as well as physical. All Keith had managed to do was get them…here.

“Why are we stopped?” Shiro asked curiously as he came into the cockpit, leaning against the back of the pilot seat to look out over the empty view on the screen. “Is something wrong?”

“They’re not here anymore,” Keith answered, raising his head. “And the signal is stopped.”

Shiro looked at the navigation panel, at the big red error message, and Keith waited for the lecture on how he wouldn’t have this problem if he’d paid attention in class. But the older pilot didn’t say anything else. He reached over Keith’s shoulder to pull up the tracker info, then punched the necessary values into Black’s system. Within a few seconds a flight path was on the screen.

“Thanks.”

Shiro didn’t answer him. He leaned back against the wall and watched the viewscreens from behind the pilot seat, out of sight, while Keith followed their course. Shiro hadn’t really spoken to him too much since the argument over Adam. Even though he had been calmer toward the end and hadn’t been yelling anymore, he had still been pointedly ignoring Keith and only speaking to Allura and Veronica before they’d gone ahead. Shiro had never gotten mad enough to act this way before, and somehow Keith found the silence worse than a raised voice.

Keith wasn’t completely unreasonable, or at least he liked to think he wasn’t. He listened. He had spent the quiet time trying to do as Shiro asked, to stop looking at the present through his past gaze. But it was hard, the only gaze he had as far as Adam was concerned was his past one. He had been trying to look back over their past interactions with adult eyes, but the conclusion he came to was one he really didn’t like.

Keith had come across a lot of people in his life who gave that same “I’ve buried bodies” vibe in his life. The most blatant example of that was Kolivan, who Keith had never had a problem with. Even though Kolivan had put him through the Blade trials and had been directly responsible for him enduring a lot of physical pain. A lot of the Blades gave him that feeling, and a lot of Blades had participated in actually beating the snot out of him during the trials, and he’d never been so aggressive toward any of them.

The truth of the matter was, no matter what angle he looked at it from, there was one glaring difference between Adam and people like Kolivan: Adam had committed the grave sin of being in a relationship with Shiro.

Keith didn’t like that truth. He didn’t like the thought that maybe he’d let Adam get to him more than others out of some kind of jealousy over Shiro. But he’d been a kid, and he’d been lonely, and in hindsight it made sense. All of his real altercations with Adam had Shiro as the common denominator.

Maybe if he’d been more social he would have realized it sooner. The only reason he could recognize it now was that he had the way he acted over Lance to compare to. Even then it was two very different things, but now that he thought about it he’d treated Adam a lot like he’d treated Allura.

_Oh my God, I had a crush on Shiro._

Keith leaned around in his seat to look at his brother, who was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and helmet off. He looked him up and down, scrutinizing him carefully. Shiro looked back at him, raising his eyebrows questioningly, but Keith winced and turned back around to face front without saying anything.

The realization left him feeling weird and kind of gross. He decided nobody could ever find out about his youthful stupidity, or he’d have to kill them.

A warning sensor went off, alerting him to the presence of something large up ahead and that the tracking signal was being picked up again. He ran the scanners and came up with a reading on two objects: a small cruiser-style ship and a familiar mech that made his skin crawl to see.

“Sincline,” he scowled.

Shiro pushed away from the wall to lean against Keith’s chair and get a better look at the mech outline slowly rotating on one overlay. He had still been trapped in the Black Lion when they’d engaged Sincline, but Keith wasn’t sure if he had been aware at the time. From the way he was frowning at the image, it didn’t look like he was familiar with it.

“We need to be very careful,” Shiro advised. “Didn’t that thing almost take down Voltron? Plus now it has a ship for support, and we’re just one Lion.”

“The signal is coming from the ship, and it looks Altean,” Keith answered, pulling up the tracking information. The starmap that came up showed the steady red pulse of the tracker coming from the ship, the coordinates listed neatly below. Except now it wasn’t the only thing flashing on the screen. “I’m getting two signals now. This other one is new, it’s moving away from us.”

“Do you think the one moving is the original and the one on that cruiser is a cloned signal for a trap?” Shiro wondered.

“No, the second one is definitely different,” Keith answered, pulling it up. “It doesn’t have a regular pulse. It’s on the same frequency, but it’s got some layers added. We’ll have to look into it later, for now let’s deal with the mess we already have.”

The ship and mech were visible to the eye now, floating unmoving in the shadows of the moon of a small planet.

“Galra cruisers,” Shiro warned, nodding toward the upper atmosphere of the planet as they approached. Keith ran a scan.

“Two,” he confirmed. “Which means a ton of strikers. There’s some Galra radio activity from the surface, too.”

“The ship looks like it’s hiding from them. Either way, better come in quiet.”

Keith changed his approach so the moon was between the Black Lion and the two cruisers and cut his engines completely, letting their momentum carry them closer. He kept a hand on his accelerator, ready to throw his lion in reverse at the first sign of trouble.

“You better put on your helmet,” he warned, his eyes glued to Sincline. “If that thing comes at us, I don’t have much of a choice but to run.”

As they drifted closer, there was no question that they were seen. There was no reaction on the part of the ship or Sincline, but they weren’t cloaked in any way and the Black Lion wasn’t exactly small. Keith cast a glance at Shiro to make sure he was ready then opened up a channel.

“This is the Black Lion, hailing the Sincline and Altean vessel. Please identify yourselves.” He waited a moment, but got no reply. “I repeat, please identify yourselves.”

Another half a minute or so ticked by with no response. Keith hit the reverse thrusters and brought the Lion to a stop, not feeling comfortable with getting too close if he wasn’t getting an answer. He tried hailing again, but got nothing.

“Maybe they’re on a different channel,” Shiro suggested.

“Or maybe they need some encouragement to answer,” Keith replied. He powered up his laser, making sure it was easily seen as he took aim for the middle of the small cruiser. He wasn’t taking any chances right now, Honerva could be on that ship. “For the last time, identify yourselves.”

It was the Sincline that responded, but not over the comms. The mech moved quickly, gliding over the ship to come up between it and the Black Lion, blocking his shot. Keith’s hand twitched on the accelerator, but Sincline didn’t fire.

“What is it doing?” He asked, his nerves starting to get the better of him. “It’s just sitting there.”

He tried hailing again. This time the mech moved closer, and Keith fired up the laser again as a warning. Sincline stopped for a moment, then nudged a little closer. The mech started waving its arms and flicking its tail in a weird, spastic sort of way.

“This is insane,” Keith muttered. “Is it distracting us while something else is going on? What the hell is it doing?”

“It’s…I don’t know,” Shiro admitted, looking just as confused as Keith felt. “But it’s not attacking. Maybe something’s wrong with it, it looks like it’s going haywire.”

“… _upid radi_ …” the comm crackled with an extremely agitated female voice. “… _iznacking piece of_ …”

“Is that…Romelle?” Shiro asked quizzically. Keith blinked, then smacked himself in the head.

“That’s how she contacted us from the outpost,” he realized. “God, I’m an idiot. Okay, I’m moving in some. You should still be ready for a quick exit though, in case it’s a trap.”

“That mech is practically doing the Macarena,” Shiro answered, still watching the Sincline with his head tilted to the side in mild confusion. “I don’t think anyone could come up with a trap that’s so…Romelle.”

Keith shut down the laser and edged them closer, and in addition to the audio a visual started to flicker up on the screen. The signal was bad, crackling at their distance, but it was definitely Romelle. She looked like she was having conniptions.

“Looks like her long range comms are down,” Shiro observed. “That might be the problem with the ship too. Romelle? Rom—stop yelling! We can hear you now!”

“Shiro!” Romelle exclaimed in relief, her signal coming in stronger as Keith moved Black in closer. “Keith! I thought you were going to shoot us to pieces!”

“Romelle, is Lance with you?” Keith asked. “Griffin…?”

“Lance, James, Acxa,” Romelle confirmed. “Lance’s friend Adam—or they might be related, they hug a lot but I didn’t want to ask—about a dozen Alteans, and Lotor. Well, Lotor and Adam went to get parts to fix our comm systems so they’re not here, but they’re…here.”

Keith glanced up at Shiro, who looked shocked to the point of being speechless. 

_He didn’t actually think he was alive,_ it occurred to him. _He hoped, but no matter what he said, he didn’t really believe it._

“How the hell is Lotor just out strolling around?” Keith asked, “and why are you of all people piloting that thing instead of Lance or Griffin?”

Lance would have been the one to pilot a mech, with James in close second. The only reason he could see why one of them wouldn’t have done it was if they were both hurt.

“It’s a long story,” Romelle answered, looking stressed again. “It’ll have to wait until we land, which we’re trying to do without being seen by those Galra cruisers. There’s a storm we’ve been tracking to use as cover, the eye will be moving close enough for us to drop through in a few minutes and then the winds should cover us for a couple hours. Follow my lead and stay close if you want to be able to hear me.”

Keith turned his sensors to the planet’s surface, focusing them in on the storm Romelle spoke of. The wind speeds were registering as higher than anything that would be normal on Earth, getting caught outside of that eye would probably cause a crash. Other than that, it looked very similar to a hurricane.

“I guess we’re landing,” Keith murmured to Shiro. “This is going to be a really tight squeeze, that storm is moving fast. I don’t know if that ship can get to the surface before the eye wall hits.”

“We’re about to find out,” Shiro answered, dropping down to one knee and putting an arm around the pilot seat to steady himself for a potential rocky drop. “Looks like they’re moving.”

The ship had started to move slowly around the moon, away from the cruisers. The Galra ships would be scanning the space outward, so Keith was pretty sure they were fairly safe there unless one of them somehow managed to get a visual on them. But the fact that they were using a storm as cover for landing meant there were more Galra on the surface they were trying to avoid.

The eye moved closer and the ship suddenly accelerated, faster than Keith had thought possible for something of its size. It was small compared to most cruisers, sure, but it could probably give a squadron of strikers a run for their money. It wasn’t a cruiser then, it was a runner, and that probably meant no weapons.

No wonder they had done so many wormhole jumps. If they couldn’t defend, their only choice was to run.

The Sincline followed the ship closely, trying to stay near enough to keep open communications without getting in the way. Keith gave them some space before following, keeping an eye on the cruisers that thankfully continued to not notice them.

The storm was wild, reaching higher into the atmosphere than any storm Keith had seen on Earth. It got dark quickly as they descended through the narrow eye, the storm walls towering up over them and blocking out the light of late day. The winds around them were vicious, making it a sinisterly perfect cover for their approach. Down below was a sprawling expanse of overgrown ruin, the crumbled and broken remains of something that might have been a base at some point but was now being reclaimed by nature.

The ship slowed as it reached the surface, firing its thrusters to bring it to a slow landing in an open space between the broken bases of what once might have been towers or spires. The Sincline landed as well, and Keith carefully brought Black down beside the mech. He watched curiously as the ship opened and an Altean woman slipped out, making a dash for a spot near one of the tower bases that looked like little more than a patch of weeds at this point. She dug in with her fingers, pulling away greenery until she revealed a heavy metal hatch, lugging it open and disappearing inside.

It was a few minutes of silent waiting, then Keith’s comms crackled again.

“Keith!” Allura called. “Red is stopped! Where are you?”

“On a small planet in a nearby star system,” Keith answered. “We’re with an Altean ship and Sincline, in the eye of a storm.”

“I think we might be above you,” Veronica frowned as her image came up on his screen. “Red’s landed on the dark side of a moon, like she’s hiding from the cruisers nearby.”

“Two Galra cruisers?”

“Yes, they’re guarding the surface. But I see a big storm down below.”

“That’s where we are,” Keith answered, leaning forward to crane his gaze up as if he might be able to see the Blue Lion from this distance. “And the eye is moving fast…can you get down here?”

“I can try.”

Keith felt Black start to vibrate then, taking a moment to realize it was the ground under him that was starting to move. He looked around wildly, and saw that they were starting to sink lower than the rest of the earth around them.

“Allura, you have to hurry,” he urged. “We’re on some kind of lift about to go down and the winds here are insane, if you get caught out there you’re going to get thrown around like a rag doll.”

“Acxa, stop the descent!” Romelle called over the comm. “The Blue Lion is coming!”

The lift was not moving slowly. It was meant for quick entrances and exits, and on Black’s sensors Keith could hear the sounds of the winds starting to move closer as the eye passed. He felt the Lion start to rock as the edge of the eye wall hit and a secondary door started to close above them, then everything shuddering to a stop as their descent was paused.

“I see you!” Allura’s voice came over the comm. “But the storm’s passing over, I don’t think I’m going to—quiznak!”

Everything got dark as the eye passed, and Keith heard Shiro curse under his breath. Allura was going to have to move with the eye, and with where they were now it was possible Blue would get picked up by the cruisers. She might still be able to reach them eventually, but it was going to be a fight against that wind.

“Hang on!” He heard Romelle call to the others. “I’ll be right back!”

Sincline had been kneeling next to Black, but now it rose and launched up into the storm. It disappeared almost immediately, and although Keith tried to follow it on his sensors there was too much going on. The storm must have lightning in places in addition to the wind, or something else to cause interference.

The seconds ticked by into minutes. The wind was absolutely howling, both Black and the ship rocking even though they were somewhat protected by now being down lower than the surface. Keith’s visuals went out as some of the suspected lightning flashed overhead, and he genuinely started to worry. The Black Lion wouldn’t have stood up to the wind out there, and Blue was even smaller.

He had just tried to hail Allura for the second time when the Sincline dropped out of the sky, firing its thrusters at the last minute to come in for a gentle landing on the platform. The mech was holding Blue under her front legs, like a small child carrying around a limp cat. Keith had never seen a robot look so put out before.

“Okay, we’re good!” Romelle chirped as Sincline lowered back down to a kneeling position. She set Blue down and Keith had to purse his lips to not laugh at the harried looks on Allura’s and Veronica’s faces as the door closed overhead and blocked out the interference, letting his communications work again.

“…nice kitty,” he praised. If looks could kill, Allura’s would have murdered him on the spot.

Outside of the Lions, the world dropped completely into blackness as the roof closed over them. The vibrations continued as they were lowered down further, finally coming to a stop with a loud hiss that he heard even from inside his ship. Nearby, the Altean runner’s lights flared on to push back the darkness, and he and Allura followed suit with Black’s and Blue’s outer lights. Sincline remained dark for the moment.

“Well, let’s go meet the neighbors,” Shiro murmured, heading out of the cockpit once Keith was rising from his seat. “Stay on guard until we’re sure it’s safe.”

They were both tense as they disembarked, but Keith did relax a little as he stepped out of Black to find it was definitely Romelle climbing down the side of Sincline and not some audio trick on the communications line. Allura and Veronica looked shaken as they stumbled out of Blue, Veronica now wearing the orange armor they’d brought along with a gun slung over her shoulder. They both brightened when they saw Romelle, who bounded over to them and threw her arms around them both.

Keith turned his attention to the ship as Shiro came to stand by him, wondering how this meeting was going to go. He still didn’t know if Lance or Griffin were just too hurt to fly Sincline, but he didn’t want to interrupt what was obviously a happy reunion to start grilling Romelle. He almost marched over to the ship and pounded on the door, but he knew as well as anyone they were probably finishing up landing procedures and would disembark shortly.

He still had to wait a few minutes before the door finally opened and the ramp came down. The first one to step out was James, and Keith felt a wave or relief even though he’d never admit it. He was okay, or at least he seemed to be until he stepped off the ramp and approached. He was wearing some Altean ground clothes instead of a flight suit, and Keith could see that one of his feet wasn’t wearing a boot. It was black metal, in a familiar sort of design.

“What the hell happened to you?” Keith asked when James reached him, nodding down to his foot.

James lifted his pant leg to show the sleek black prosthetic leg and Keith felt a cold flash of dread. Not only had one of their pilots been kidnapped and held prisoner, but he had lost a limb in the process; this was the exact opposite of good news.

“Somebody _shot_ me, and still hasn’t apologized,” James called back over his shoulder at the Alteans who were beginning to filter out into the spotlights, sticking close to the ship and looking at them all suspiciously. James turned back to him and nodded toward Keith. “Knee couldn’t be fixed, they replaced everything from that down. What the hell happened to your face?”

Keith was about to angrily ask what was wrong with his face when he remembered the last time James had seen him he’d looked a little more human. But he wasn’t about to admit he had a quintessence problem, least of all to James Griffin.

“Genetics,” he lied, looking past James to the group of Alteans. He recognized Ariella, who immediately hid behind an older girl when she saw him looking.

“It’s good to see you’re okay,” Shiro put a hand on James’ shoulder. “We were starting to worry when we heard from Romelle about Lance but didn’t hear anything about you.”

“Yeah, I was out hiding in the general population with Captain Wolfe,” James answered, looking mildly pained. “We escaped and hung out there a couple days before he finally lost his goddamn mind. Blew up half the outpost, kidnapped Lance, stole Lotor’s unconscious body out of spite. Then he got his ass beat by Honerva and Lance shot him, so all in all I guess it’s been a pretty average week and a half for him.”

“He went up against Honerva?” Keith could hear the underlying tone in Shiro’s voice and looked over at him. He was doing his best to not look horrified, but Keith could tell he was remembering his own nightmare of going up against Haggar at Central Command while Keith had been distracting Zarkon outside. “And Lance _shot_ him?”

“Okay, that came out sounding worse than it was,” James raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Lance was fighting Honerva with him and shot him by accident. But Romelle got them out of there with Sincline and then Camille healed him up.”

“I am so lost on all of this,” Keith breathed, running a hand through his hair. “Why is Romelle flying Sincline? Who’s Camille?”

“Everybody good? Okay, stay together,” a familiar voice commanded from over by the ship. “We’re going to split up into groups, some of you will stay here and some of us will go prep for our stay. Nobody wander, got it?”

Keith’s head swiveled immediately in the direction of the runner, his gaze sweeping everyone there until they settled on the one standing at the top of the exit ramp, the last one to step out of the ship. Like the rest of them he was in Altean clothes for being planetside instead of a flight suit. Looking at him, Keith felt something heavy settle in the pit of his stomach.

“He looks different,” he heard Shiro murmur from beside him. “I mean, even more different than on the Atlas.”

Lance’s hair, which before had only been streaked through with lavender, was now mostly lavender and only streaked through with brown, and the marks on his face were darker than they had been before. He had changed since Keith had cornered him on that balcony.

“Yeah?” James asked, looking over at Lance critically. “He’s looked like that at least since we left the outpost. But that was the first time I saw him looking like one of these space pixies at all.”

“The fight with Honerva?” Keith supposed, speaking to Shiro but not taking his eyes off Lance. “She likes throwing around quintessence.”

Shiro could only shrug, he didn’t know any more than Keith did right now. Lance was at the bottom of the ramp now, finally turning away from the group of kids to look over at the new arrivals. Keith had a brief flash of panic, unsure of how this meeting would go. There was no telling if Lance remembered their last run-in or if he’d have to start again from scratch. Keith remembered Lance’s arms, the skin covered with desperately written names, and the way the other Paladin had looked at him back on the Atlas as if he were a hated enemy.

“Keith!”

Keith only had a few seconds to process what was going on before Lance sprinted away from the others and jumped on him, leaving him stumbling backward with his arms full of 140 pounds of overexcited boy. He threw his arms around Keith’s neck and wrapped his legs around his waist, leaving him to scramble to catch his balance before they ended up on the floor.

Keith wrapped his arms around Lance’s middle as he dropped his feet back down to the ground, hugging him tightly and burying his face against Lance’s neck. He was okay, he was really okay, he was alive and completely away from Honerva and back with them where he belonged. Keith hadn’t even known how badly he’d wanted this moment until now, as he kept Lance close in a vise-like grip.

Lance pulled back a little, but Keith wasn’t willing to let go yet. He expected the other boy to push him back, maybe say he was overreacting, but instead he felt fingers run through his hair and Lance’s head rest against his.

“You going to be all right?”

It was almost funny that it was Lance murmuring that, keeping his voice soft so the others didn’t hear, even though Keith had been perfectly safe this entire time and not the one in danger.

“You’re asking me?” Keith laughed against Lance’s shoulder and raised his head, resting his forehead against Lance’s. Lance didn’t pull away, but even in the off-hued spotlights from the ships the blush that bloomed on his cheeks was vivid. Keith wanted to kiss him, but he didn’t think Lance would be comfortable having an audience for that.

Keith reluctantly let him go and found himself immediately replaced as Veronica threw herself at her brother, both of them ending up sprawled on the floor when Lance didn’t see it coming and wasn’t prepared. He backed away to give them a moment, finally taking a moment to look at their surroundings as he moved over to the others.

It was a hangar, that much was clear from its construction, empty except for their vessels. The kneeling Sincline and sitting Lions were only a little short of the closed roof, so it definitely wasn’t made for bigger ships. Keith came back to stand by Shiro’s side, where Allura was staring at Lance and looking distinctively uncomfortable.

It was understandable. Suddenly finding an Altean standing where a human should be had been jarring for them all.

“We need to find somewhere to talk,” Shiro thankfully took control. Keith knew he should have been doing so since he was technically the leader, but he really felt out of his depth right now. “We need to be filled in on what’s going on, and the sooner the better. Where are we?”

“You’re on the colony,” an Altean woman declared as she finished speaking with one of the older kids and approached them. “The _actual_ first Altean colony.”

Keith had a momentary brain glitch as he tried to put the familiar features and voice together with the unfamiliar skin tone and face markings. He knew who he was looking at as soon as she spoke, but everything about it seemed wrong.

“Yeah, Acxa’s actually Altean,” James said with an offhanded wave. “She’s Altean, Lance is Altean. I’m pretty much the only one in this group who isn’t Altean, it’s kind of disturbing.”

“The colony was in the Quantum Abyss,” Keith protested. “I was _there_. My mom was there, Romelle was there.”

“Shiro’s right, we need somewhere to talk,” Acxa answered. Keith got the feeling she had only barely contained a snort. “Come on. We have to go get the power started up in the bunker and get people into quarters, the sooner we’re settled the sooner we can plan.”

She motioned for them to follow. Keith moved back over to pull Veronica and Lance to their feet and he followed along as they left the Alteans to wait by the ship.

“Plan,” Allura repeated, now looking at Acxa with the same discomfort she had aimed at Lance. “What exactly are we planning for?”

“Hold on,” Acxa requested.

They crossed the hangar to a door and Acxa rolled up her sleeve, looking at a list of codes that had been written there. She tried two before the third one worked, the door sliding open and lights starting to flicker on along a long hallway. She headed through and Romelle and James followed, leaving the others to look at each other uncertainly.

“It’s fine, it’s safe,” Lance piped up from where he stood at the back near Keith. “You’ll see, she’ll explain everything in a bit.”

Shiro looked back at Keith and Allura and shrugged, then followed after them. Allura sighed and went along with Veronica right behind her, and Keith let Lance go first. As he passed Keith caught his hand, tangling their fingers together and pulling him over so they were in step. He waited to see if Lance would get embarrassed and pull away but he didn’t.

It was nice, but kind of disappointing. Keith had thought they’d be getting to this point on a date, maybe on a walk after dinner, not in a strange underground base with Galra cruisers circling overhead.

The area they walked through was of clearly Altean design, but of similar enough layout to the Garrison that Keith could guess at what he was seeing. The walls had windows into dark offices that had likely once been used by those whose job it was to keep the hangar running, and they passed by a large room that looked like it might have been a break room for workers and pilots. There was furniture in most of the rooms but it was either covered with clothes or stacked neatly in corners; this place had been systematically shut down, not simply abandoned one day.

Acxa led them to an elevator, which she accessed with another of the codes written on her arm. They went down a floor, and then turned right twice to go through some double doors.

Now they were in a living space. This was some kind of common area, a wide open room with tables that had their chairs stacked on top of them and what looked like sofas covered in drop cloths at the far end. Things had shifted in the very long time since it had been used, a few of the chairs fallen and a couple of the tables having given in to time and collapsed. The structure itself seemed to still be fairly sturdy.

Acxa went to a control panel and fiddled with more codes. After a few tries lights started to come on, and Keith could hear the hum of air recyclers kick in. She led them out of the common area and down a hall lined with doors into private quarters, similar to dorms. They kept going just past that, into a cafeteria.

This area showed signs of life, surprisingly. The tables and chairs here were visibly newer, and the counter that had once been for serving large numbers of people was lined with boxes with Galran writing on the side that marked them as emergency rations. Acxa opened one of the boxes and brought it over to the table, dumping out boxes and packets and pulling over chairs so there were enough.

Keith looked at Shiro, Allura and Veronica again, but they obviously still didn’t have any answers. They pulled out chairs and sat down as Axca came back again with a case of what looked like bottled water.

“This bunker is the very first site of the original Altean colony founded by Lotor,” she said, handing out bottles. “The planet was far away from active trade routes when it was founded—it still mostly is, but ships do stray near it often enough—and this area of the planet has regular storms like the one going on now that kept scanners from picking the place up. It fell out of use when the population expanded too much, but as you can see we we had a team who would come down yearly to make sure there were rations and supplies in case of emergencies. There are storage rooms down by the living quarters with clean blankets and more food.”

“I don’t understand,” Keith accepted one of the bottles, taking the chance to really look at Acxa in the light. It was so strange, seeing her hair fall loose without those bony crests he was used to, and her skin being so pale. She had always been smaller than other half-Galra, with very human-like features, but he’d never imagined she was a disguised Altean. “If this is the colony, what was the place where we found Romelle?”

“A waystation,” Romelle answered. “A medical bay and recovery station that was supposed to be made safer by being outside real time.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us that when we found you?”

“I didn’t remember,” Romelle answered dully, dropping her eyes down to her water bottle. “I was a patient. My memory…it was a mess. A lot of what I thought I knew wasn’t real, it was just things I’d seen at some point smashed together in ways my brain thought made sense.”

“But the people we saw in those tubes…”

“Other patients,” Romelle frowned. “They were overexposed to quintessence while gathering it from the rift gate to help fuel the second colony. They weren’t being drained, they were being treated.”

“No,” Allura shook her head, starting to look upset. “No, that can’t be right.”

“This planet has a city on its surface,” Acxa said, refusing to look at Allura. “In a geographical area that’s much calmer than this storm-prone site. Altean children are born and raised here by carefully selected and trained caretakers while everyone else goes to help colonize a secondary planet once they come of age. Quintessence runs everything. The rift gate was the energy source, it was collected and taken to the second colony by pilots like Romelle. The Sincline was Lotor’s project to access the quintessence field without needing the rift gate…not just to take away the Galra Empire’s reason for expanding, but to create an energy well on the colony that would no longer have to risk Altean lives to tap.”

“We fucked up,” Lance declared from beside Keith, picking at the label on his bottle. “Lotor was on a bender after testing that ship in the quintessence field, he was still messed up when we fought him.”

“Lotor has an addiction, ten millennia alive in this hell hole of a universe will do that to a person. Normally after exposure like that he would go to the medical facility and spend a few days in recovery,” Acxa added. “A few days there would be hours in real time. But he didn’t get that chance, he was dragged off by Shiro’s clone and he was desperate to get back to the Castle of Lions and explain himself. He was still under the influence when we got back and found the rift gate destroyed, completely unstable.”

“Honerva learned about the colony somehow through that clone,” James spoke up, glancing over at Acxa. Keith thought he saw sympathy in the other pilot’s face. “In the three years while Lotor was gone she found it, killed off the Alteans guarding it, and took any of the kids she tested who came up as gifted. The rest are being held here by the Galra.”

“What?” Shiro stiffened next to him, and Keith felt a similar thread of anger. “There are kids here? How many? How young are we talking?”

“The youngest were brought here right before Lotor’s disappearance,” Acxa answered. “They’d be about three. The oldest here would be twenty-one, but I suspect she had any older non-gifted children killed. She wouldn’t want anyone old enough to reason or fight back being around. The oldest that are actually here and still alive are probably around eight or nine.”

“The only reason for her to even keep them would be to raise them knowing nothing but captivity and hope they produce a next generation with a decent percentage of gifted kids,” Keith frowned. “This woman is sick.”

“We already knew that once we found out what they did to Shiro,” Lance answered. Keith felt him squeeze his hand under the table. “I can tell you from firsthand experience that she only cares about those kids as far as they can pilot those alchemically powered mechs, they’re all disposable to her. She just needs to keep the population going just enough to keep supplying her with new, naive pilots over time. The only reason she wanted to hang onto me was because I had enough experience to direct those suicide runs for her.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” on Keith’s other side, Allura was gripping her water bottle so tightly her knuckles were turning right. “We…we destroyed the rift gate for nothing. _I_ opened the way here for Honerva.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Acxa finally looked at her. “And I’d take that crown off if I were you. Your useless dynasty is dead, and nothing from it is welcome here.”

“Acxa,” Lance warned.

“We don’t have a princess or a queen,” Acxa snapped at him, pushing her chair back and rising. “We’ve always treated Lotor as a savior because that’s what he is…he’s earned his title with his actions and he keeps doing so. We don’t accept “mommy and daddy passed it down to me” anymore.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Lance let go of Keith’s hand to rise as well. “You're pissed off. Believe me, we all get it. But if you guys wanted us to trust you then you should have trusted us enough to tell us the truth first. When that fight was about to start, Lotor’s _doctor_ was there but made the conscious decision to not open her mouth. You should’ve spoken up when he wasn’t in the condition to. _Everyone_ here shares some of the blame.”

Keith looked back and forth between Acxa as they engaged in a very severe staring contest. He had to give Lance credit for staying so calm, if he had opened his own mouth it would have been a lot less pleasant. Across the table, James raised his hand.

“I was in school at the time, I heard Shiro was dead, and I don’t know what Veronica was doing but she obviously wasn’t here,” he supplied. “So not, you know, everyone.”

“Nobody was including you, we all forgot you were here,” Romelle told him, rubbing his arm soothingly.

“Wow, thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I have to go get those kids into rooms so they can eat and get some rest,” Acxa said sharply, kicking her chair back out of her way. “Linens for the sleeping quarters are out that door and down the hall, you should pick out places to stay for the night. Lotor and Adam should be here sometime tomorrow. Excuse me.”

She stormed out. As the door closed behind her, Veronica let out a breath.

“Well, this…is a mess,” she said carefully. “But she’s kind of right, we’re all running on fumes. We should grab some rations and find a place to get some sleep, come back at all this in the morning.”

Keith looked over at Allura. She was staring at her water bottle and looked like she might cry, and to be honest he didn’t blame her. She had been so hurt at what she’d thought was Lotor’s betrayal, he didn’t doubt she had genuinely cared about him. Now they were being told that their judgment had been way off, and she was finding out that the people she’d been trying to avenge were worse off because of her.

In their search for Lance none of them had slept well in days. She needed a break, she needed to go somewhere private where Romelle and Veronica could comfort her.

“Let’s go grab rooms,” he agreed out loud with Veronica, getting up from his own seat. “We’ll get some sleep, and then get some more details and discuss it all in the morning. We’ll need to have a meeting of our own before Lotor gets back.”

He was very curious as to how Lotor had survived in the quintessence field for almost four years now, and he wanted more details about this medical facility and second colony. Obviously if there really were Altean children here being held by the Galra under Haggar’s command, they definitely needed to free them…but he still wanted a more thorough explanation of what was going on.

“I’ll go help Acxa herd the kids,” James decided, grabbing a rations packet and heading after her. “See you guys in the morning.”

“Come on, let’s go grab a room,” Romelle said softly to Allura, tugging her up from her chair.

The three girls went through the doors to the living quarters and James disappeared back the way they’d come, leaving Keith there with Shiro and Lance. He looked back and forth between them and was about to ask if they wanted to go pick rooms when Lance leaned forward across the table toward Shiro, slapping both of his hands on the table for support.

“Adam’s alive,” Lance informed him.

“So I heard from Romelle,” Shiro looked up at him, the calm expression he’d kept throughout the conversation melting into one of concern. “Is he all right? She said you guys went up against Honerva and that he got shot.”

“Uh, the being shot was my fault,” Lance admitted, looking guilty. “I was aiming for her, she moved, I hit him. But Camille—she’s one of the older girls who was in training to be an alchemist before Lotor disappeared—she healed up the knife wound I took to the side and Adam’s lasershot injury. The ship’s got a healing pod, but we were conserving energy.”

“And he’s with Lotor,” Shiro noted. “Why? Where are they?”

“They went to the medical facility in the Quantum Abyss,” Lance said. “While Lotor was working with Allura to create the Sincline he was also apparently working on some kind of treatment for his quintessence addiction. They made a detour on the way so he could put some of that together and Adam could pick up parts to repair our long distance comms…they got fried in the outpost fight.”

“And is Adam all right?” Shiro pressed. Keith looked back at Lance, who looked reluctant to speak.

“He’s not…not all right?” Lance tried, absently rubbing his arm. “I don’t know. I think he might be sick or something. Like, he always looks tired even after he sleeps, and he hasn’t been eating. I was hoping the trip to this place would give him some time to really rest, so hopefully he’ll be a little better when he gets back.”

He hesitated, looking at Keith. It was a sort of nervous reaction, and Keith knew it meant Shiro probably wasn’t going to like what he said next.

“He…won’t really talk about you,” Lance said after a moment. “Or about Earth. He’ll let me talk until I’m blue in the face and he’s fine with like, talking about current things, but I think spending a year and a half in the gladiator pits really messed him up. He’s the same, but like…he’s not the same. So just give him a little bit of space, huh? I’m sure he’ll come around, he did for me and James. But you also really need to prepare yourself before you see his face. He has a lot of scarring around his eyes, they got messed up in the invasion fight and the Galra replaced them with implants.”

Shiro’s expression went from concerned to one that Keith couldn’t really read. Almost devastated, and Keith didn’t have to guess why. It was that same guilt that sat on all of their shoulders, the knowledge that if they hadn’t been missing for three years their planet wouldn’t have fallen to the Galra.

Shiro dropped his gaze down to the table, absently picking up one of the ration packets. He got up slowly, running a hand through his hair.

“Thank you,” he murmured to Lance. “I’m going to follow the girls’ lead and go grab a room, you guys should get some sleep. We can all meet back up in about six or seven hours.”

Keith watched Shiro follow the others, feeling a faint sense of dread himself. It wasn’t exactly a secret at the Garrison that Adam had been a bit fanatical about protecting his eyesight. He had asked Shiro about it once, and apparently one of Adam’s loves was being out in the wilderness where good eyes at night were essential. It was such a twisted irony that his eyes were what he would lose, this guy could not get a break.

Lance sighed and headed out of the cafeteria after giving Shiro a few minutes to get ahead and be alone for a little bit without being bothered. Keith fell into step with him again as they headed for the storage area Acxa had mentioned, draping an arm around Lance’s shoulders as they walked.

“Are you really okay?” He asked.

“Me? Yeah.”

“ _Really_ really?”

“ _Really_ really. Are you?”

“No.”

Lance chewed his lip a little as they found the storage room, the door left open from the others already having been here to grab blankets. They grabbed a sealed box and opened it up, each grabbing one of the vacuum-packed bags labeled as having a blanket and pillow.

“Okay, me neither,” he admitted admitted quietly.

“I didn’t think you’d be.”

Keith put an arm back around him as they left the storage room and made their way down the row of doors. At the other end of the hall he could see James leaning against a wall with his arms crossed, talking across the hall and into an open doorway where he assumed one of the Altean kids was standing.

“I think he’s getting a crush on Acxa,” Lance paused in opening one of the bedroom doors to follow his gaze. “For a guy who literally lost a leg to a blaster wound, he’s been pretty mild in his constant whining.”

“I hope it doesn’t come back to bite him,” Keith answered. “I thought I knew her, but obviously I was wrong. Trusting her could be a huge mistake on his part.”

“I don’t know,” Lance pushed the door open and turned on the lights, leaning in the doorway to look around. “She’s a soldier doing whatever she has to do to win the war for her people. That’s the Galra way, isn’t it? Victory or death. And the Blade…the mission above all else. If I was fighting against the second near-extinction of my species, I’d probably be shooting and kidnapping people too.”

“You’re not wrong. But that’s even more reason to be careful, someone willing to do anything is also willing to stab people in the back.” Keith pulled his attention away from James and leaned against the outside of the doorway. Lance was just inside, and he suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Sorry. I’m not trying to turn you against anyone, I know you can make your own choices.”

“No, it’s…” Lance ran a hand through his hair, looking genuinely flustered. He avoided looking Keith in the eye, instead gesturing to the interior of the room with the sealed pack in his hand. “Did you, um, want to stay in here tonight?”

Oh. _Oh_.

The answer was that Keith absolutely wanted to share a room for the night, but he didn’t want to come off as overexcited about it. That might seem pushy, and maybe a little bit creepy. They weren’t exactly at the point where “hey, come share a bed with me” was a casual thing, even if they had no intentions of doing anything inappropriate.

“Sure,” he smiled and stepped inside, closing the door behind him and blocking out the faint noise of others settling in. “But I bet your sister’s going to come at me like a mama bear in the morn—”

He was cut off when he turned back around by Lance’s hands on his face, followed by Lance’s lips on his, and took an instant to recover before wrapping his arms around his waist and holding him close. The kiss was brief and kind of shy, something that Keith still found funny considering Lance’s very public “loverboy” persona, and Lance was blushing a little again as he pulled away.

“Were you just waiting to get me alone to do that?” Keith teased.

“Yes,” Lance admitted, laughing a little as he pulled away. He leaned down to pull a small knife out of a strap at his ankle and used it to open the sealed linens, pulling out the two blankets and fluffing the two pillows. “I felt like it was my turn.”

Keith was not going to complain. He moved over to lean back against the small desk and start unclipping his armor, looking around while Lance laid out the bedding. The room was similar to those they’d had in the Castle of Lions, and gave him a pang of nostalgia. The war had been hell even then, but somehow it still felt like things had been simpler in the beginning.

He watched Lance as he pulled off his breastplate and set it aside, the other pilot’s fast, sure movements as he put down and tucked in one blanket in place of a fresh sheet. He was quick and practiced, a military man well-trained in efficiency in living quarters. Those little things, the seemingly unimportant activities where his years at the Garrison bled through, were so at odds with Lance’s personality. Keith was so used to seeing him as a Paladin, as an equal member of a team, it was almost unfathomable to try and imagine him saluting and silently taking orders as a regular soldier.

Lance finished and straightened up, giving the made bed a tiny nod of satisfaction before gripping the bottom hem of his shirt and pulling it up over his head. Keith yanked too hard at his vambrace when he saw that, successfully hitting himself in the face with the back of his fist. He made a pained noise that made Lance look over at him curiously as he folded the shirt, which he turned out to be wearing a tee shirt under.

“You okay, man?” He winced in sympathy, when Keith rubbed his stinging cheek. “Watch out for those clasps, I almost kicked my greave through a window a couple months ago because I didn’t realize it was loose.”

“Yeah, it’s new armor,” Keith answered, tossing the vambrace on the desk as if it had personally offended him. “Allura upgraded it all. Yours is stowed in Blue, we can get it for you in the morning.”

He looked back at Lance as he started pulling off his greaves and cuisses. He had kicked off his boots and was taking off the small knife sheathe at his ankle.

“Red is here,” Keith said, watching Lance curiously. “Did you know that?”

“She’s what?” Lance was reaching over to fluff one of the pillows more but he dropped it, looking up at Keith with wide eyes. “She’s _here_?”

“She almost wrecked the Atlas hangar trying to get out and come find you,” Keith answered. He had been wondering why Lance hadn’t said anything about his Lion but now he had his answer; apparently he wasn’t even personally aware he still had a Lion. “We were following her when I picked up the tracking signal. She’s hidden herself up on this planet’s moon.”

Lance looked down at the pillow in his hands almost absently, and Keith could practically see the gears in his head turning as he stared at it.

“Lance?”

“I thought I was hallucinating,” Lance said hesitantly, looking up at him. “Back at the outpost, when it was me against Honerva. I thought…I thought I’d killed Adam. I didn’t really remember him yet but I knew that I knew him and I was so distracted. She was ripping through my head and I knew it was over, I just remember like, screaming for Red because it was the only thing I had left to try. And she answered me.”

He rubbed his wrists, and it was only now that Keith realized the suppressor bracelets hadn’t simply been shut down, they were gone.

“I don’t really remember it,” Lance admitted. “But she fought off Honerva for me, in the astral plane. I _saw_ her, I saw Red. I can’t remember anything about her, but I’m sure I did. Or maybe all of this just finally threw me off the deep end.”

“You’re not crazy,” Keith assured him, pushing away from the desk and flopping down on the bed on his back. He’d never admitted this to any of the others, but now that Lance claimed to have a similar experience Keith felt less like he was going mad himself. “And if you are, we both are. I can never remember it either, but I know I’ve seen Black before. Like you said, in the astral plane.”

“Space gets weirder every day,” Lance murmured, dimming the lights and sitting tiredly on the edge of the bed.

He stretched out on his stomach next to Keith, leaving about half a foot of space between them. The bed wasn’t meant for two people, Keith was pressed over against the wall and he could see that Lance was just barely not on the edge. He let out a sigh through his nose and looked up at the ceiling, absently tapping the fingers of one hand on his chest and trying to ignore that he wasn’t alone.

It wasn’t easy. Lance was hugging his pillow with his chin resting on top of it, staring at the wall, one foot hanging off the bed and lightly kicking.

_This is absolutely ridiculous._

They’d both known it was a single person room when Lance had asked him to stay and he had agreed, and they’d both been in Altean accommodations enough to know the bed would be small. Neither one of them had come in here with any intention of spending the entire night with six inches of open space between them.

That was what Keith was hoping, anyway. He was pretty good at reading situations wrong though, and he was hesitant to do anything only to find out he was pushing Lance outside of his comfort zone. Why did this dating thing have to be so hard?

Were they even considered dating if they’d never been on a date? Or did their trip to the movies count as a date? Keith didn’t think so, even if they had held hands. Dates were kind of intentional, people didn’t hold hands and then refuse to acknowledge they were doing it if they were dating. What about the bar afterward? Probably not. He’d mostly danced with Veronica. Lance had stayed at his apartment after that, but that didn’t count either. He’d been pretty drunk.

Keith focused his eyes and zoned back in to find Lance leaning over him, looking ridiculously cute with the way his hair fell down around his face.

“There’s not enough room,” Lance declared, doing a pretty good job of looking annoyed even though his furious blushing gave him away. “You’re gonna have to suck it up and put up with me laying closer.”

Keith was caught off guard. In his head he quickly put together the perfect response: a flirty smirk, say that it’s okay, Lance can admit that he’s afraid of the dark, open his arms to invite him much closer than he probably planned on laying. In his mind it was perfect, the kind of response someone smooth would give. Too bad it never made it as far as his mouth.

“Okay,” Keith answered, staring up at him like an idiot.

“Okay,” Lance nodded and sat up to grab his pillow and slide it over closer. Keith wanted to kick himself.

He steeled himself and sat up, intending to wrap his arms around Lance and pull him down. At the same time, Lance apparently decided being this shy was stupid and moved to lay down with his head against Keith. They slammed their heads together, Lance letting out a string of ‘ow ow ow’s and Keith muttering a litany of curses in Galran.

“Okay, I give up,” Keith said weakly, letting himself fall back onto his pillow. He grabbed the second blanket and pulled it up over his head while Lance dipped forward to bury his face in his own pillow. “Just…just shoot me, I’m useless.”

He felt the bed shaking a little bit and for a moment thought Lance might be crying, which was a disturbing thought in and of itself. But when he pulled back the blanket and turned his head to look he found the other pilot laughing hysterically, his head having missed his pillow by a mile when he’d doubled over. Lance was the point where he was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes and couldn’t get enough air to make any real sounds, just sort of leaning forward helplessly with his face against the mattress.

Keith couldn’t help it, Lance had an infectious laugh and the situation was funny, he started laughing too. He covered his face with the blanket again to muffle the sound and laughed until his sides hurt, letting out weeks of pent up frustration and fear and anger. As he finally finished he dropped away the blanket to look at Lance again, who had now managed to get his head to the pillow and had calmed down to faint giggles as he started to regain control of himself.

Lance was gorgeous when he was laughing or smiling, when he was completely relaxed and not trying too hard or worried. The marks and hair were a little jarring but Keith knew he’d get used to that, though he had to admit that Lance’s eyes were very pretty now. They had been pretty before, of course, that lovely shade of blue that ran in his family. But now they had that faceted sprinkle of differing shades, and that iridescent shine Alteans had that made them looked like some exotic polished stone.

Or maybe he was just being stupidly poetic because he’d fallen for this cool ninja sharpshooter.

Keith sighed and rolled over on his side, hooking Lance and pulling him over against him. Lance came willingly, sliding an arm around him in return and laying down a little lower on the bed so Keith could rest his chin on his head. Their legs tangled together lazily, all in all far more comfortable than being pressed to the edges of the bed and trying not to touch.

He was tired but he forced himself to stay awake a little longer, patiently waiting until he heard Lance’s breathing deepen and felt his body completely relax. Making sure he was really out, that he wasn’t too troubled to sleep. It was only once Keith was sure that Lance was asleep that he let himself finally doze off, lulled into his first decent rest in days by the body nestled against him and the arm around him holding him close.


	15. Chapter 15

The medical facility’s hangar was pretty much exactly how Lotor had left it, save for the fact that one of the stolen Galra strikers was parked on the secondary runway as if it had recently been used. The usual hum of activity that he’d grown used to since the place had been built was gone, and he didn’t doubt that if he went to inspect the shelves of tools and parts that lined the walls he would find most of it covered in dust.

The med techs who had worked under Acxa and two other doctors were gone, the therapists who had rehabilitated patients down on the planet’s surface were absent. Lotor had recalled everyone who wasn’t already in a healing pod or actively being treated back to the colonies in preparation for the Sincline’s first test in the quintessence field.

It’s success was meant to have resulted in everyone being immediately relocated to the second colony. The three ships’ use as access points to an unlimited power source was meant to end the struggle of the hostile planet’s barely trained alchemists, an end to the long days of manually turning barren nothing into arable land inch by painful inch. Families were to be permanently reunited, real cities built, a defensible civilization finally grown.

Instead the medical facility sat empty still, almost four decaphoebs later. Silent, abandoned just one more place where life had flourished until he’d failed to protect it.

Lotor had tried to prepare himself to see it like this but it was still a shock to his senses. It hadn’t been four decaphoebs in his experience, for him it had barely been a week since he’d faced off against the Paladins and Allura. He remembered vividly his surprise at finding Romelle on the bridge of the Castle of Lions, hurling accusations against him. Accusations he couldn’t even defend against, because he had no idea what she’d even told anyone.

Just a vague insinuation that Alteans had died during his work. Which was absolutely true and not something he would ever deny, their sacrifice meant too much to pretend it hadn’t happened. But the Sincline’s maiden voyage had revealed some adjustments that needed to be made to how much it allowed its pilots to be exposed, as any ship would require after its first test, and Lotor had been severely affected by the trip.

He had been unable to even make sense of why Romelle, of all people, would be accusing him of anything. Unable to think as clearly as he normally might have, to get to the bottom of what was going on and set things right. His head had been foggy and he had been feeling testy, just wanting to rest.

And, if Lotor was being honest, Allura’s presence hadn’t helped.

It had been a very long time since Lotor had let himself get truly attached to anyone. Acxa was perhaps the closest he had to a confidante, but she was his medical advisor and a trusted general. They had what might have become a real friendship once a truly safe haven had been established, but both were all too aware of the sacrifices war sometimes required and were wary of going that far. The people of the colonies weren’t his subjects, but they weren’t his equals either. They were civilians, the people who he served. They lived their lives and raised their families and built their future, while Lotor existed as an “other” working and fighting from the outside.

But Allura was different. Allura and Coran were his mother’s people, _his_ people, two of his kind who had been born in the age Lotor was trying to recreate. Living remnants of long destroyed customs and culture. Allura was a princess from a time when a royal house existed to defend and protect rather than enslave and colonize.

He had found something he’d spent a long time looking for in her. She wasn’t just a princess, she was a warrior. She had helplessly watched her world burn firsthand, she understood the things he’d gone through better than anyone else ever could. There were a lot of things they had in common, like their interests in music and literature and sport, and Lotor had loved every stretch of hours spent away from working on the ships to mess around in the Castle’s common room with old Altean games or out of date movies stored in the ship’s databanks.

But it went deeper than that. Because when Lotor needed to take a break, to be alone or rest because his thoughts were turning dark and haunting, she didn’t just understand that he needed some time to himself. She understood _why_. When she slipped away from the others to have a moment of quiet and try to forget she was at war, she didn’t mind his company because she knew he had been where she was.

He and Allura had their glaring differences but they were very much alike. He had finally been comfortable opening up to someone and starting to be honest. The thought that that was gone now, that just a week ago he had been fondly watching this absolutely beautiful woman laugh and smile at him but now was thought of only with disgust…

_You’re more like Zarkon than I could ever have imagined._

It hurt.

A lot of things from the past few months of his memory hurt. He had killed his own father, ended Zarkon’s imperialist expansion, a necessity that should have been a considered a grand victory. But Lotor found it just made him feel hollow, more like throwing up than celebrating. It still didn’t sit with him completely right even now, leaving him feeling almost like he’d committed some unforgivable sin. He couldn’t put it into words because he didn’t know _why_ what he’d done was haunting him, only that it was.

But even after doing so, it had only taken the span of a few heartbeats to lose Allura. Just as it had taken him barely the length of a breath to lose Ven’tar. Lotor was well aware of what that kind of loss felt like.

So after the trip through the Abyss, he had a very good idea of what was going through Adam’s head when Kuro came to greet them in the hangar.

But besides the shock and pain Lotor imagined he was probably feeling, he could see that there was something else underneath. The way Adam tensed as Kuro came near, the way his eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. There was something there that Lotor knew made Kuro unsafe, that moment of coiled tension right before an angry animal was ready to strike. Ingrained instincts of a creature that was programmed to murder things that made it uncomfortable, because it wasn’t built for critical thought.

And it was very fortunate for everyone involved that Lotor was old enough, traveled enough, and had seen enough to know what that thing was before someone ended up hurt.

Lotor was careful, as he left the shuttle and approached the other two, to get a good hold on Adam’s collar from behind in a spot that would be difficult to shake his grip. It was likely that the only thing saving Kuro from immediate frustrated attack was Adam’s initial shock, and that would’t take long to wear off. He had seen Nixa before, back when he was young and they were more plentiful, they were easy to surprise but they always followed it up with bite.

Lotor had suspected there was something sinister in how he’d found Ariella herded into a closed corner this morning, and now after what he'd seen in the Abyss he was confident that he had been correct. The only question now was what to do about it.

Kuro, as amiable now as he had been when Lotor and Acxa had first brought him here, was too pleased to see friendly visitors to realize there was a problem. Especially since he apparently recognized both of those visitors.

“Adam Wolfe,” Kuro smiled brightly as Lotor made brief introductions, standing too close for Lotor’s comfort. He tightened his grip on Adam’s collar, prepared to use his greater strength to strangle him into unconsciousness if necessary. “You went to school with Shiro. I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything past his third year at the Garrison, but I remember you shared a flight class.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed further. He did not seem to like that a stranger wearing Shiro’s face also had traces of Shiro’s memory.

“Kuro, I know it’s been a while, but it would be better if we speak in the lab,” Lotor advised. “I’ll explain shortly, but our timeline is a bit on the urgent side.”

“Sure, the hangar’s dusty anyway,” Kuro finally stepped back out of Adam’s immediate reach, turning to go back up the stairs so they could follow. He took them two at a time, the white lab coat he wore almost tripping him up. “Did you guys want something to drink? Eat? Kitchen’s stocked. Oh, be careful, I adopted dogs.”

“Dogs,” Lotor repeated, making sure Adam went ahead of him so his back wasn’t exposed. “What are…dogs?”

“Big,” Kuro answered, making a motion more reminiscent of ‘huge’ with both hands without turning around. He reached the top of the stairs and opened the door, leaning back against it to hold it open for them. “Fluffy. They’re Earth animals. So I guess these things aren’t really dogs.”

Lotor made sure Adam went through the door without incident, but the way he looked at Kuro still made him uneasy. If his suspicions were correct, there was no way the Lorelia medical bay had what Adam needed and there was no way to tell how long it would be before this situation went from probably dangerous to an immediate emergency.

“They’re some kind of space wolves or something,” Kuro was still talking as he followed them, letting the door swing closed. “I didn’t actually adopt them, they just do this weird thing where they pop in and out of wherever they want to be. Two decided the pathogen lab was theirs a couple years ago, and I’m not about to fight Cujo and Fenrir over millennia-old germs.”

Lotor had no idea what he was talking about. He had no idea what a dog was, or a wolf, or a Fenrir or a Cujo. But Kuro was genuinely happy to see other living people, so he simply nodded as if he understood.

“How long have you been here?” He asked, glancing back at Kuro. The man had aged some, lost the few traces of youth that Lotor remembered him having when last he’d seen him. He didn’t look old by any means, but more like he could be Shiro’s older brother than a copy. “Have you stayed here since we brought you?”

“I’ve made trips,” Kuro answered. “When I realized I knew how to pilot I took a shuttle out every couple months to get a feel for what was going on. There was a lot of Galra chatter on the comms so I never went too far…just to that one waystation we stopped at on the way here to grab supplies now and then.”

They came out of the hall into the main laboratory, the sleek and modern room filled with research and medical equipment. The lab tables all had things laid out on them and there were papers and folders everywhere, clearly Kuro had been keeping busy while he was here.

“You were studying?” Lotor asked.

“Medicine,” Kuro confirmed. “Ten years so far. If you’re here long enough you come across plenty of hurt Abyss creatures, I’ve had a pretty good run of hands-on practice.”

Kuro came around them to cross the lab, heading for one of the tables where he had been working. Lotor let Adam go, letting him wander a few feet away while he veered off to pick up a familiar device from a shelf. Lotor turned the small disc over in his hands, checking to see that it wasn’t broken, and activated it. A small red light came on.

“Adam,” He called.

When the other man looked up Lotor tossed the disk, letting it slide across the floor until it hit Adam’s foot. As soon as it made contact the red light went green and two thin arms extended out, a ring of light about five feet in diameter connecting them. It shot upward, forming a dome of crisscrossed threads almost like a net, solidifying into a glowing cage of quintessence.

Domesticating wasteland wasn’t the only thing his people had been working on before he’d disappeared.

Adam, to his credit, did not leap at the bars the way a captive animal would. There was still a glimmer of human rationality in there, the ability to reason and first consider the possibility that there might be some kind of shock or feedback if he did. He kept his distance from the glow and spun around once, taking in the fact that he was very much a captive, before shooting a glare across the lab at Lotor.

“What the hell is this?” He demanded. “Turn this thing off!”

“Later,” Lotor answered calmly, leaving the shelves to move across the room to where Kuro was standing, looking startled. He opened a drawer and found a sealed syringe and needle, tearing it open as he made his way back over to the cage. “First you’re going to give me a blood sample.”

“What I’m going to give you is a broken neck if you don’t let me out of here,” Adam threatened, almost lunging to try and grab Lotor through the bars. Now _there_ was the animal, agitated and lashing out. Adam only barely caught himself and stopped before he actually touched the glowing threads, and even then he had to ball his hands into fists to try and quell the urge to keep trying to attack. “Back off, you can take your needle and shove it.”

So eloquent. Lotor had a feeling Adam was actually being very mild in his threats at the moment, likely too distracted by his own predicament to really go off. He came closer to the cage and reached out to touch one of the threads in the net-like structure, concentrating on it carefully.

Lotor had never been alchemically trained, he had never learned any of the basics of temperament that were necessary to advance in Altean alchemy. He was impatient, impulsive, and quick to frustration, all traits he recognized in himself and accepted. These personal failures were why he had been unable to advance in Oriande, and why he was unable to manipulate quintessence the way Haggar or Allura could. But he was still Altean and he was still gifted, and he was able to do small things.

Now he carefully widened one of the openings in the net, weaving the threads of quintessence into a different pattern and making it large enough for Adam to put his forearm through. He readied the syringe, watching to make sure Adam didn’t try to grab him through the opening.

“Do you enjoy being angry?” He asked conversationally. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think you enjoy any of this, honestly. I imagine you’re terribly uncomfortable right now, that you want something but you don’t know what and it’s making you upset. Isn’t that why you went after Ariella earlier? You probably didn’t plan to, or even want to, but you felt like it would make you feel better. There may be ways to make your discomfort go away, but first I need a blood sample.”

Adam pinned him with a glare, the kind of unblinking look that would make a normal man back away in fear, made even worse by the way the light glinted off of silvery irises. He leaned forward until his face was almost touching the cage, tall enough to be only an inch or so short of standing eye-to-eye.

“Fuck. You,” he hissed before pulling back, turning away to start pacing the cage. “I’m not a lab specimen for you to experiment on.”

“No, you aren’t,” Lotor agreed. “I imagine you’ve been treated that way by Haggar enough in the last decaphoeb anyway. But I will get my sample, if you’re not going to cooperate I’ll simply have to wait for you to get weaker and take it by force. I have two days before I have to leave here to meet the others, you look like you have about a day left in you at all.”

He set the syringe down on a nearby tray and went over to join Kuro, who was leaning forward against one of the tables and watching the whole exchange with a mix of interest and confusion.

“I have to commandeer one of your spaces,” Lotor said apologetically, beginning to move some of the books and notes out of his way. “And I’m afraid I have some news about how everything is going outside of here, and none of it is good. I’m going to have to leave again shortly.”

“The Galra empire is broken into factions,” Kuro answered, beginning to help clear the table. “I know. I don’t pick up a lot of news, but I pick up enough when I go out. Haggar’s basically running one that used to be Sendak’s, it’s the biggest and it gives her control over the biggest chunk of Galra territory. The new colony is cut off by a faction war, the old one is under Galra occupation.”

He picked up a pile of books, looking guilty.

“I’m sorry. I feel like I should’ve tried to do something. But…Shiro might have been a soldier, but I’m not.”

“It’s all right,” Lotor assured him, punching in the code to open a storage cabinet that only he had access to. “There’s no shame in choosing to be a healer instead of a fighter. I didn’t bring you here to make you do anything you didn’t want to do.”

It was interesting, knowing Kuro after having known Shiro. Well, the Shiro who Lotor had known had been another clone, but since the Paladins hadn’t noticed he could assume that the clone had the original’s accurate personality. The two were alike, from what he’d seen, but also very different.

Lotor didn’t know Kuro as well as he could have, either. After finding him in a cryo pod in Haggar’s lab they had decided not to leave him to suffer as an experiment and had brought him with them to a waystation where Lotor and his three generals had paused to decide what to do. From there Lotor and Acxa had brought him here, after managing to split up with Ezor and Zethrid so they didn’t find out the facility existed.

There had not been a lot of time to devote to him. Lotor and Acxa had spent about a day getting him acclimated, then had to join the others for what would become a fateful altercation with the Paladins. It was during that span that they had realized he did not have Shiro’s full memory and considered himself a separate person. Kuro had chosen his own name then, the foundation for building his own identity, and had been told he would be free to leave the facility if he pleased once everything died down.

He was, for lack of a better phrase, a nice guy. In spite of having just been liberated from a laboratory and finding out he was a clone, Kuro had been very agreeable and compliant. In fact, it had been Lotor’s intent to go back and explain himself to Allura then bring her here to the facility, to show her Kuro and prove he had no hand in anything nefarious.

Lotor watched Kuro carry the pile of books over to the shelf by the cage where Adam continued to pace. He held himself differently than Shiro, not as military-trained straight and tall, and he had a more laid back way of moving. He wasn’t as muscular, he’d clearly done some kind of activity over his stay here to keep fit, but Shiro would definitely out-muscle him any day. His hair was styled more similarly to Keith’s, if Keith had ever figured out that haircuts were a thing and that hair in one’s eyes at all times was the exact opposite of a fashion statement.

Adam stopped pacing and was watching Kuro. Lotor kept an eye on the pair of them as he started unpacking containers of components from a box he’d taken out of the storage. At some point Adam had tested his cage and realized he wasn’t going to be shocked by the glowing bars, now he leaned up against it as Kuro finished shelving the books.

“So, you remember me from the Garrison?” Adam asked. He seemed a lot calmer now, and didn’t sound quite so angry or upset.

“A little.” Kuro humored him by staying there to talk, leaning against the shelf and keeping out of Lotor’s way so he could start working. “You kept kicking Shiro in the back of his chair every time you passed, he didn’t like it.”

“He was oversensitive,” Adam answered. “Well, you should remember some of how he was. Uptight overachiever, everything by the code. I kind of got the feeling he was weirdly insecure.”

“I don’t really remember him being that way,” Kuro mused, trying to think back. “I guess I could see why he’d come off that way, he was very driven.”

“Insecure,” Adam repeated. “You don’t have to lie about it, he’s not you. You’re different, you come off way more confident.”

“You have a very odd world view, then. But since you make me sound better than I am I guess I’ll let you have it.”

“Heh. You’re funny.”

Lotor’s head shot up, his eyes narrowing in suspicion. Adam had gone from ready to commit a murder to blatantly flirtatious, and although Kuro was smart enough to know that Lotor had used the cage for a reason and was keeping his distance, Adam was up to something.

_He wouldn’t dare._

Lotor had an idea of what was about to happen and he knew he should stop it in its tracks, but he was curious to see how it actually went down.

“So I heard you say there are some kind of wolves staying in one of the other labs,” Adam practically cooed. He had one foot resting up on the cross section of two bars, hip jutted out, everything about his stance saying Kuro was more than welcome to come closer. “How about you turn this thing off and show me?”

“Okay.” Being smart was of no help to Kuro at that point. He started to reach for the metal piece at the cage’s base to put in the code and turn it off, and Lotor had to roll his eyes.

_He would dare_.

“Kuro, please don’t do that,” Lotor requested.

“Okay,” Kuro repeated as he immediately straightened up and put his hands behind his back, looking uncomfortably at the cage as he realized what he had been about to do.

“Unless you want to,” Adam dropped his voice, probably unaware Altean hearing was slightly better than human. “You’re a grown man, you don’t have to let anyone tell you what to do. I’m not asking you to give me the keys to a ship, just let me out of here so you can take me on a tour.”

“Sure, I can do that,” Kuro started to reach for the code input again.

“Don’t do it,” Lotor warned.

Kuro pulled back again. This time he looked back and forth between Lotor and Adam, rubbing his temples in visible confusion. He pointed irritably at Adam.

“Is he doing something weird to me?”

“He’s hypnotizing you with his voice,” Lotor answered, carefully measuring out a light blue liquid.

“Oh. Oh, that’s damn _rude_ ,” Kuro moved away from the cage, giving it a wide berth as he moved around it.

“And conspicuously not mentioning to you that you’re a copy of the man who used to be his lover, so he knows exactly what to say to you while he’s doing it.”

“Using my love of dogs against me,” Kuro gave Adam a look of mock outrage as he passed to rejoin Lotor. “I feel so betrayed.”

Adam made an inhuman noise of frustration and slid down the bars to the floor, kicking one leg up to rest against his prison as he laid out otherwise flat, as if he’d been murdered. There was so much unnecessary drama in the action that it actually gave Lotor a little bit of hope; angry pacing was a predator’s reaction, behaving like an absolute child was—in his experience with the Paladins—a human one.

Lotor left him there on the floor and continued his work, and Kuro settled in at a different table to make notes as he read through medical texts. It looked as if he was writing a research paper no one would actually read, continuing to teach himself in the absence of formal schooling.

It was about a varga before Lotor finished capping a row of small vials and slid the tray into a cooling shelf, pulling the gloves from his hands and shedding the lab coat he’d pulled on. Adam was still on the floor, but by now had worked himself into an even stranger position, with both legs up in the air against the cage but his upper body twisted so the side of his face was against the floor.

Lotor crouched down outside the cage, resting his chin on his hand. He was completely unsympathetic.

“You know, this can all be over with if you just let me take a blood sample. I understand that you’re not a man who trusts easily, so if you don’t trust Kuro and I then at least trust my ambition. I need to liberate that colony, it’s in my best interests to make you healthy and useful.”

Adam’s eyes rolled up to look at him. Lotor waited to see if he would tell him off again but he was too tired, whatever burst of energy he’d had upon initially being caught was gone. Instead he slowly pushed himself up to his knees and let his arm hang out through the opening made earlier.

Lotor fetched the syringe and took a full vial of blood, and once the needle was out of his arm Adam sank back down to sit on the floor with his back against the bars.

“Kuro, do you know how to run a health overview snapshot?” Lotor asked.

“Of course, it’s pretty basic.”

“Good. Do that, please.” Lotor capped the vial and tossed it to him. He put down his pen and caught it, rising from his work to go to the console over by the wall.

Lotor was curious as to how solid Kuro’s medical knowledge actually was. If there was anywhere he was going to learn some of the most advanced medicine in the empire it was here, in Acxa’s constantly expanded library, but that really depended on his dedication to self-study. With war on the horizon a trained doctor was a very useful thing to have, Lotor hoped Kuro lived up to his promise.

Kuro prepared the sample quickly and efficiently, clearly well-practiced from his many encounters with the Abyss wildlife. He ran the requested scans and pulled up a report, his lighthearted air dissolving into a serious expression of concern as he went over the results. Lotor had an idea of what they would show but he wanted a second opinion to be sure.

“What does it say?” He prompted.

Kuro snapped out of his silent thoughts, remembering that when there were actual people present he had to speak out loud.

“There’s definitely a problem,” he answered, making a swiping motion on his screen to bring the results up on the holographic projector in the middle of the room.

Adam turned a little to see what was going on, listening intently. Kuro moved to where he could address them both easily, pointing out things on the scan.

“I’m going to assume there’s nothing wrong with the scanner and that you’re actually a half-human mix,” he told Adam, pointing to parts of the report. “Over here is the Genetic Nutritional Index, the system scanned your DNA and this is a list based on that of everything that should be coming up in your bloodstream and in what quantities in order for you to be healthy. Over here is what’s actually present.”

The breakdown of what was in Adam’s bloodstream varied in color from green for things that were at healthy levels to orange for things that were dangerously low. Kuro pointed to a bright red item.

“So…you don’t produce insulin. Instead you have luferin, which is found in a couple species of large aquatic carnivores and does a similar job. Or rather you’re supposed to have luferin, there are some traces of it in your system but your body’s not making it. In animals that make it, luferin is pretty much a necessity to function…without it, digestion continues as normal but literally nothing gets absorbed.

“They eat, but they don’t get anything out of it. Healing stops, if they’re injured they just stay that way. The body runs on whatever it’s got until there’s nothing else it’s capable of burning, then it starts to shut down. At that point most animals will just start killing indiscriminately as their brain tells them they need to eat something to survive.”

“Do you think there’s any chance he’s stopped producing luferin due to a natural cause?” Lotor asked. “Disease, possibly?”

“What else would it be?”

“Humor me and look.”

Kuro went back to the console and started running something else, Lotor couldn’t see what from where he stood leaning against a table near the cage. There was no hesitation in any of his movements, he was confident that he knew what he was doing.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Kuro said darkly after a moment. His hands started moving faster over the console keys and overlays, he’d found something he was not happy about and was really digging in.

“Not disease?” Lotor asked.

“Its an engineered auxotrophy. That’s…why would…how does someone even…”

“Well, from his stuttering I’m going to assume this isn’t promising,” Adam said from where he still sat on the floor. Kuro threw another few reports up on the hologram.

“Part of the lack of luferin is that your blood’s not being scrubbed and it’s got a buildup of things like dead cells,” he told Adam. “I ran a scan on a sampling of cells. Some of them are normal, some of them have traces of dalphromazine. That’s a binding agent used in synthetic viral delivery cells, usually ones used in gene therapies.”

“Haggar genetically engineered your body to stop producing luferin,” Lotor translated. He wasn’t terribly surprised, it was what he’d expected. Kuro had simply confirmed his suspicion. “It’s a practice that was banned a long time ago even in Galra territory, which tells you exactly what people think of it.”

“Somehow I doubt they banned it out of the goodness of their hearts,” Kuro snorted.

“No. They banned it because the constant production of synthetic hormones for use on a large scale was expensive and not economically sustainable,” Lotor answered. “One has to have a heart before there’s goodness in it.”

“Well, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kuro answered, leaving the hologram to go over to one of the tables and shoving his papers aside to make a clear spot. He started digging through cabinets. “Sort of. We can definitely synthesize luferin here, but it’s going to take time. It’s not exactly a common hormone in intelligent species so there is no standard method, but it acts enough like insulin that I can probably figure it out.”

“How long will it take?” Lotor asked.

Kuro tapped his fingers absently on the table top. He looked over at Adam, who appeared completely indifferent to all of this, then back to Lotor.

“About six days. And that’s if the insulin synthesis method translates flawlessly.”

“He doesn’t have six days.”

“Well, desperate times call for desperate measures,” Kuro answered, pulling on a pair of gloves and filling a fresh syringe from a bottle of clear liquid. “The luferin will take time, but there’s a supply of organ transplant fluid in storage. An IV drip has a chance of keeping him stable until it’s ready.”

“I’m not being hooked up to a bag of random chemicals,” Adam protested irritably. “Especially not for six days.”

“It’s not random chemicals. Give me your arm.”

Kuro brought the syringe over to the cage and Lotor watched Adam carefully in case he went on the attack again. But all he did was sit up straighter and put his arm out of the opening, letting Kuro give him the injection. He’d pretty much given up on fighting any smaller battles here.

“When organs are removed for transplant they’re stored in a nutrient-rich solution that keeps their cells alive. Part of that solution is an agent that does the job of things like insulin and luferin, it lets cells absorb the energy they need to keep functioning. But it breaks down almost immediately in the presence of other enzymes in the actual body, so I can’t just give you a shot of it every few hours. You’re going to have to sit and relax with an IV hookup.”

“It’s the only way you’re getting out of that cage,” Lotor warned. “You absolutely cannot be trusted with freedom otherwise.”

He finally pushed away from the table to go to the console, but instead of continuing through the medical database he accessed his own files, digging through the thousands of years worth of study. He had become a scientist in recent centuries, turning his focus more toward finding Oriande and learning alchemy, but in the beginning of his banishment he had focused more on history and ethnography. He had to search for a few minutes for what he knew was there somewhere, a folder with those beginning notes from back in the first hundred years or so of his life.

“These are Nixa,” he told Kuro and Adam, pulling up an image of a Galra couple posing with hunting blasters. “They’re aggressive carnivores that prefer using their sharp canines to kill prey by draining blood before consuming the carcass. If they’re not in the mood to chase something, which they like to do for fun, they can mesmerize a victim into standing still and dying quite agreeably.”

Kneeling on the ground by the Galra were five humanoids, their skin tones varying from an alien red to a brown similar to what might have been found in Alteans or Earthlings. They all had metallic silver hair and gold-colored eyes, and shared similar facial features and structure. The main commonality between them all was that they were all eerily beautiful, and none of them looked happy to be there.

“Before the destruction of Nalquod, they were a common threat in our star system,” Lotor explained. “They looked like many more intelligent species and they were genetically related, but their main habitat was water and they were nomadic. They had no system of writing, no permanent settlements, and no need for technology since they lived in the wild. As Adam has seen in an Abyss vision, they are incapable of speech as we know it and communicate through song and other soft sounds, though survivors seem to have evolved to use sign languages.

“All in all, they were considered animals. This didn’t change after Nalquod’s destruction, but what did change was that there were suddenly fewer of them and they had no ocean planet to retreat to. They were stuck with what seas and water sources were available on other, much more rocky planets, making them easier to find and capture. Nixa are efficient pack hunters, wealthy Galra would acquire a pod and use them in sport hunting of large game.”

“Because that’s never a bad idea,” Kuro said sarcastically. He was over by the delivery shaft, punching in the commands for the automated system to pull the nutrient solution he wanted out of storage. “I know when I go out to track down space tigers I sure don’t feel safe unless I’m surrounded by a pack of angry water vampires.”

“Oh, they were very forcefully domesticated before being sold,” Lotor assured him. “Vocal cords were removed to leave them mute so they couldn’t manipulate their new owners, they were rendered sterile so they couldn’t grow the pack and gain strength in numbers, and they were genetically programmed to stop producing luferin. Trainers would withhold injections for a few days at a time to teach them what would happen if they disobeyed their masters, and if they ever disobeyed commands their owners would simply not give them an injection that day as punishment. If they escaped somehow, they simply died. They are not stupid animals, they learned quickly to be obedient.”

“And Haggar’s over ten thousand years old, so she’s well aware of this method,” Kuro pulled a box out of the delivery shaft as the system brought it up, sitting it on the table to start taking out bottles of more clear liquid. “Why do I have a feeling this isn’t the first time she’s using it?”

“It probably isn’t. I would guess she’s begun using it to keep her test subjects in line ever since you escaped before she could put any control systems in place on you.”

“Does anyone care that my arm is really itchy right now?” Adam asked from where he was still sitting on the floor.

“Oh, yeah, that stuff has like ten thousand known allergens in it,” Kuro said offhandedly. “But as long as you don’t go into anaphylactic shock you’ll be mostly fine.”

“Okay cool, for a second there I was worried it might be something actually serious.”

“More serious than your itch is the fact that you’re likely going to need a steady supply of luferin for the rest of your life,” Lotor interjected, bringing Kuro an empty IV bag for him to fill from the bottles. “It’s not a hormone that’s produced by people, only in some animal species. There is no process or genetic therapy for fixing a problem considered to exist only in wildlife.”

“You can feel free to stop insinuating I’m an animal and not a person any time now,” Adam said irritably. “It is literally not illegal for you to stop using that word.”

Lotor looked up from holding open the IV bag, over to the cage. Adam had gotten to his feet now and was leaning against the bars, tired but clearly not done being fiery. He looked like he was ready to fight over it. Lotor hadn’t meant it in an insulting way, he had only meant that current science didn’t consider luferin to be a valid medical problem, but clearly it was a touchy subject.

And no wonder, really. _You’re not a person, you’re a curse,_ was what the woman in Adam’s memory had said if Lotor recalled correctly. He was intimately aware of what it felt like to be thought less of because of parentage.

“My apologies.” He left it at that, doubting any further explanation would make any difference.

Kuro finished prepping the IV bag and then disappeared, saying he was going to go get a hook for it. Lotor frowned up at the blood sample reports, not entirely sure how they could handle this going forward. Adam was ill, very much so, and there was no way of knowing how long daily shots would even be a sustainable treatment. Most captives who had been altered this way didn’t live for too many years after for there to be very much viable research on the subject.

This complicated things. Lance was not going to be happy when Lotor returned without Adam, nor would any of the other Paladins be if Adam had taught them as well. Not to mention having to be the one to explain this all to Shiro, if the other Kuron Project clone was indeed now really him. It was just one more setback in a terrible series.

Lotor cleared the reports away and went back to his claimed workstation, leaving Adam to Kuro’s care instead. The man had proven he knew what he was doing, there was no reason to hover. Especially not when Lotor had his own important work to do.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kuro tended to run places. Partly because the medical facility, although small, was still rather large for only one person to be working in and there were no such things here as interns to pull files or bring things out of storage. But partly just because there was nobody to tell him no and he could. He did a lot of things just because there was nobody to tell him no; he made a decision and then he did the thing with no thought to the consequences. It was a good system.

He had called this facility his home for about fifteen years now. A few months shy of four years out in “real time,” stretched out far longer here in a valley of the Quantum Abyss. A lot of people might have balked at that, at living half a lifetime alone while only a fraction of that time passed by outside. To Kuro, it made no difference.

He didn’t have any family, just some vague, incomplete memories of Takashi Shirogane’s upbringing. There was a little bit there about Earth, enough for Kuro to feel like maybe he belonged there, but not enough to give him the impression he’d ever spent time there or had left it behind. He didn’t really have a job since it wasn’t actually him who had enlisted in a planetary military. He didn’t have friends, he’d never actually met other people outside of the few traders he saw at the waystation.

There were some things he did have, though. He did remember aspects of Takashi’s culture and language. Kuro identified as a Japanese man, it was the culture he knew. His belief system was a heavily modified version of Shinto that fit better with living in a geographical and temporal aberration in space. He was a scientist, that much he had definitely inherited from the original, but since he already had the universe at his fingertips if he wanted Kuro had been drawn to medicine instead of flight.

Medicine was an intensive field of study, especially given that he had many different species to learn about instead of just one. Anatomy, disease, aging, reproduction, pharmaceuticals, prosthetics, transplant, surgery…he had dedicated the last ten years to mastering as much of it as possible.

Because he knew that war would reach this quiet place eventually.

Kuro might have only been born (technically) a few years ago, but he wasn’t naive. He had experienced Haggar’s anger when he’d turned out to be a failed product and the false memories just didn’t take completely. He had watched her bring in the next clone and try again, this time successfully implanting Takashi’s identity into a new vessel. He had witnessed her torturing Kuron extensively so she could be sure he was genetically identical enough to have the same stress reaction, to develop that same patch of white in his hair. He had watched her scar Kuron’s face and body while he was still awake to experience it, had seen her removing a perfectly healthy arm to add a prosthetic that would match the original’s. He had watched her erase most of that, leaving Kuron psychologically scarred and traumatized in a way he would simply connect to a past of fighting in the Galra arena.

When Kuro had left the labs for the first time, he had gone to the location of the Kuron Project, to the storage facility on a barren moon. The coordinates had been in the data Lotor had stolen when he’d blessedly set him free, it wasn’t hard to find. When he’d arrived he’d found that most of the facility was gone, released and fallen to burn up in the atmosphere of the planet below. Kuro had downloaded the database and then destroyed what computer equipment was left, returning to the Abyss.

There wasn’t much there, just logs. Information on how the clone capsules had been kept, such as temperature and humidity. But those logs showed that on the last day of the lab’s existence the lift up to the storage platform had been used twice, and that the first to access it and leave it open for the second had been Kuron.

There had been some kind of altercation there, that was one of the two things Kuro could discern. The second thing was that the facility’s emergency self-destruct had been activated by Kuron, not by Haggar.

Whatever orders he had been forced to comply with, Kuron had still been based on Takashi Shirogane. If he hadn’t been explicitly ordered not to damage any of the other clones, he had decided to take them all down with him and end the project.

Kuro knew a lot about the Kuron project, he’d had ten years to study all the data. So he knew that Haggar would come after him eventually, that he wasn’t going to be able to stay here forever. But he wasn’t like his predecessor, he wasn’t a physical fighter. So he’d done everything he could while he waited to learn how to take care of the people who did fight.

Adam wasn’t his first actual patient, but he was currently the priority. So Kuro had no qualms about taking a shortcut to the triage center through one of the labs, jumping up on one of the tables and hopping across the others to the other side of the room instead of going around. He landed on the floor and opened the double doors by throwing himself bodily against them, because who had time for door handles.

He was in the triage unit and on his way to the halls where the gurneys were lined up when he heard a crunching sound and skidded to a stop, listening. It was coming from back in the treatment area.

Kuro made a detour and peeked into the back, into the large, open area that would have been separated by privacy curtains if anybody had been here to be in the beds. In the middle of the floor was a large gray wolf with red markings on her face and chest, chewing away at something.

“Hoshi? What are you eating?”

The wolf paused, her black eyes rolling up to look at him. As if knowing she was in trouble, she started chewing faster.

“No!” Kuro ran over and tried to grab whatever it was before she could swallow it. It was one hell of a wrestling match since Hoshi was just about the same size he was, and far more dedicated to winning the battle. “Come on, what’s in your mouth? Spit it out you brat…oh, Jesus, you can’t have these!”

Kuro managed to work the pill bottle out of her mouth, getting up and holding the spit-covered plastic up out of her reach.

“No!” He said firmly, pointing at her. “ _No_! You’re not supposed to be in here! Out!”

Hoshi tilted her head to the side, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, making no move to leave. But he’d known he was wasting his breath when he said it, so he put the pill bottle back up on a higher shelf and went to go retrieve a gurney. She trotted alongside him, sniffing at his lab coat as she picked up the smells of strangers.

The weird wolves in the pathogen lab didn’t particularly like Kuro, but Hoshi was a different matter entirely. She had been one of three cubs the mated pair had produced about five years ago, the runt of the litter, and for whatever reason she hadn’t passed muster and the others wanted nothing to do with her as they got older. So Hoshi apparently decided that if the four-legged residents wouldn’t be hers, the two-legged one would.

Kuro had learned this the night he’d woken up to find out Hoshi had flopped down on top of him in his bed, which had been a fun time. Half his weight in strange canine popping into his room through a locked door to lay across him, it had taken a few days to recover from that. Since then she came and went, preferring to go out and catch her own food but always coming back to hang around. He had taught her some commands, and sometimes she even obeyed, but mostly she just acted like an indignant furry roommate who refused to pay rent.

She followed him back to the lift but didn’t get on, she didn’t like the enclosed space or the noise it made. Instead he stepped back out on the next floor up to find her already there waiting for him, trotting along with him as he went back to the lab. She immediately picked her way over to the table where Lotor was working and stood on her hind legs, resting her front paws on the table so she could lean over and sniff at what he was doing.

Lotor glanced up, then did a double take. He immediately grabbed anything that wasn’t covered and could spill and pulled it back out of Hoshi’s reach.

“What _is_ that?” He demanded.

“She,” Kuro warned, bringing the gurney over to the cage where Adam was also curiously watching the wolf. “That is a she. Be careful, they’re smarter than a lot of other animals. They know what you’re saying sometimes. Tell her she’s pretty, she likes that.”

Kuro knelt down and punched in the deactivation code for the cage, the glowing bars disappearing and the arms retracting back into the disc. He put it on a shelf and patted the gurney, motioning for Adam to sit on it. He could hear Lotor awkwardly talking to Hoshi, mostly asking her to please not try to eat what he was working on. He sounded more intrigued by her than anything.

“Feel any better?” He asked Adam once he was seated on the edge of the gurney. The other man just looked at him.

Adam really did not like him. Kuro wanted to understand, but he honestly just couldn’t. He’d obviously never dated anyone, he had no idea what it would be like to be in love with someone and then see a stranger who looked like them. But Kuro wasn’t Takashi, he was an entirely different person, and he didn’t like being thought of as just a copy.

“What I gave you earlier was an antidepressant,” Kuro tried again. “It has nothing to do with treating you, but it’s fooling your brain into thinking everything is okay. If you start having problems again let me know and I can give you another shot.”

Though Kuro was beginning to think it might be a good idea to just give Adam regular doses of the antidepressant anyway. He didn’t need the danger explicitly spelled out, he had gotten the message. Now Adam seemed less angry, just very tired and clearly feeling a bit contrary. Kuro rolled the gurney over a few yards to the wall, making him squawk in surprise, and pulled out a curtain to separate him from the rest of the lab.

“Undress,” he requested, moving over to a storage drawer to pick through packaged patient uniforms.

“Excuse me?” Adam sounded almost insulted, like Kuro was asking him to strip down just for the fun of it.

“Undress,” he repeated, picking out a uniform he thought would be the right size. He held it up as he came back over, setting it on the gurney beside Adam. “Disrobe. Strip. Lose the flight armor. Do you want me to help you with it? I can, who doesn’t like taking off other people’s clothes?”

“No, I do not want you to help me with it,” Adam snapped, sliding off the gurney to physically shove Kuro back past the curtain. “I can handle it just fine, thanks.”

He was blushing. It wasn’t easy to tell with his complexion, but he’d been a bit on the pale side since he’d gotten here and there was definitely a flare up of red at Kuros’ teasing. Which was amazing considering how straight-faced he’d flirted to get out of that cage earlier.

Apparently Adam was one of those people who didn’t know what to do if they weren’t the instigator. That was adorable.

Kuro gave him a few minutes to change before he came back. Adam had obediently put on the looser clothing, and the short sleeves made it easier for Kuro to hook him up to the IV. He did so as gently as he could.

“You can call me Ryou if you want,” Kuro tried again to engage him in conversation as he made Adam lay down. He wasn’t an enemy here and he didn’t want to be thought of as one. “I know most Earth cultures use first names.”

“Is that your first name?” Adam asked, closing his eyes as Kuro pressed lightly in a few places on his abdomen. He was tensing up with every press. “So what’s Kuro? Last name? Ryou Kuro?”

Adam was in pain. Kuro could feel it, he had probably been in pain for a while and had been hiding it since he got here.

“Ryou Kurogane,” Adam guessed, correcting himself. He tried to keep his sigh of relief when Kuro stopped pressing quiet, but it didn’t go unnoticed.

“Correct. Hold on for me for a minute, I’m going to grab something.”

Kuro left him for a moment to go back to the lab tables. Lotor had moved down because at some point Hoshi had simply jumped up on the table and taken it over. She was lying there watching them while Lotor paged through his notes. Kuro filled a fresh syringe with a painkiller and grabbed a handheld scanner, returning to the gurney.

He kept the syringe down at his side where Adam wouldn’t see it, certain the other man would decline it just as he’d been fighting being helped since he’d arrived. Instead of offering it, Kuro pretended the IV tube needed to be adjusted, detaching it briefly from the bag so he could inject the painkiller through it down below the side of the gurney where it wouldn’t be seen. He reset everything back the way it was and hid the empty syringe in his lab coat pocket.

It worked fast. Kuro was running the scanner as Adam’s eyes started to flutter sleepily. He started to relax finally.

“There, that’s not so bad, is it?” Kuro asked, daring to reach up and smooth the hair back out of Adam’s face. “You don’t have to be uncomfortable anymore, we’re going to take care of you. It’ll just be a couple days of resting and then we’ll have shots ready for you and you’ll be good to go again.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life having to take shots,” Adam answered tiredly. “This isn’t diabetes. If I end up not having access to this stuff again, other people are going to get hurt.”

“Then we’ll fix you,” Kuro answered simply, studying the readouts coming from the scanner. “That’s what I do.”

“Yeah? With what nonexistent treatment?”

Kuro glanced up at him. Adam wasn’t looking at him, he was staring up at the ceiling. Kuro might have only dealt with a few patients so far but he didn’t need to be a practiced doctor to know what he was seeing. He was human, and he recognized fear when he saw it.

“It’s nonexistent now,” Kuro answered confidently. “But so was everything else at some point. It’s not a matter of whether we can figure it out, it’s just a matter of how long it will take.”

Maybe Adam’s genetics were a little bit novel, but it wasn’t like he was the first inter-species person to ever exist. Lotor was an example of that, and there were plenty of half-Galra out there. It was just a matter of untangling the code and figuring out how to fix the parts that were broken. And for Kuro, it was personal.

Maybe he wasn’t the kind of man who could taken on Haggar in a physical fight, but he could try to undo all of the horrible work she prized so much.

“Why Kurogane?”

“Hm?”

“Why not Ryou Shirogane?” Adam mumbled, still gazing sleepily up at the ceiling. “Even if you’re not him, isn’t it the same as being a twin or triplet or whatever?”

“Technically,” Kuro supposed. “But I guess I just liked the poetic element of it. Shiro means white, Shirogane means silver. Kuro means black, Kurogane means iron. Silver is very elegant, but iron has the potential to become steel when it’s pushed far enough.”

“I never liked calling him “Shiro,” even before we were together,” Adam admitted, closing his eyes. “I’ve always called him Takashi, ever since I found out that it meant “precious.” What does Ryou mean?”

“Bright,” Kuro answered. “Or something along those lines. Bright, clear. What about Adam? Does it have any kind of significance to it?”

“Not really, it’s was the first name on the first list my parents saw and they didn’t bother to look any further. But in the Bible it’s a generic word for “man” or “people,” and there’s a wordplay on it that means “earth.” So I guess it’s ironic that I’m going to die in space.”

“Lots of people die in space, you’ll be in good company,” Kuro answered, finishing with the scan. “But not for a very long time, hopefully. You’re exhausted, you need to sleep for a few hours. I’ll come back when it’s time to change out the IV and we’ll figure out the best thing to have you eat.”

Adam didn’t take much convincing, he was already mostly out. The painkiller wasn’t even the kind that would knock a person unconscious, he was simply so tired that his body was giving in as soon as the pain stopped. Kuro pulled the curtain around further and went back out into the lab to rejoin Lotor.

“What do you think?” Lotor asked as Kuro started the scanner in uploading its results to the main system.

“It’s bad,” he frowned. “Half of his organs are ready to shut down. There’s no use even putting him in a healing pod, if his system can’t produce luferin his cells can’t get energy and the pod will barely stimulate any healing. That will have to wait until I can synthesize a few doses so it will actually fix him.”

“In the meantime there’s no option but to keep him on the nutritional solution mix,” Lotor deduced. “For six days at least. This is not ideal.”

Lotor folded his hands and rested his chin on them, looking a bit tired himself. Not physically so, but frustrated and irate.

“There are a small number of Alteans headed to a bunker on the first colony,” Lotor told him. “They’re with Acxa. Gifted kids, but all very young. They’re accompanied by one of the Paladins of Voltron, do you know of them?”

“Some,” Kuro admitted. “It came up a few times while I was at the waystation. After you disappeared it was a big thing about how you were last seen with them but they were gone too.”

“Their names aren’t common knowledge, but Takashi Shirogane is one of them. From what I gathered from the other Paladin, Lance, his body is the Kuron clone that you saw Haggar preparing in her lab, but the consciousness in it is the original Shirogane. Is there anything you can tell me about this clone, Kuro?”

“Absolutely.”

Kuro shed his lab coat to more comfortably move around, no longer needing it to keep the Altean military uniform he wore underneath clean. He accessed the Kuron Project files and pulled them up for Lotor to view, then leaned against the table to pet Hoshi.

“According to the records, Kuron was Haggar’s third try at the project. There was the Jojeeli Project and the Maasqui Project first. Jojeeli means “clone” in Skalesian, which was the first species she used, Maasqui means the same in Grendaylin, which was the second. Kuron is just the Japanese phonetic way of saying clone, which was the native language of her subject. She’s not very original with names, but the good part of that is that if we ever get access to her database again we can just search for the word “clone” in all known languages and see if there were any other attempts at the project we’re missing.”

“So Shiro was just another attempt at a project that had already failed twice,” Lotor mused. “But why? What was the point of the project at all?”

“Well, first of all, if you run my blood—and probably Shiro’s now—you’re going to find that it’s not pure human. There’s Galra and Altean, but then also genes from various animals that are spliced in to build a sort of super soldier. My immune system is insanely overclocked, I tried exposure to some mild pathogens back when I still had access to the lab and none of it had any effect. I just don’t get sick. And I heal fast, so we’re probably built to recover from injuries that would kill normal people.

“I should have aged more than I have as well,” Kuro added, lightly poking at a spot under his eye were there were faint laugh lines. “If I matched Takashi when I was created, I was physically twenty-five or so. Fifteen years here on top of that, I’m around forty years old. Humans should look older than this at that point. I have very high stamina, which is probably the Galra, and more physical strength, which likely comes from the Altean. I can go longer without sleep and without eating than most, yes I did test it. And, probably the most important thing of all, I look like the original.”

Kuro let go of Hoshi to go pull up images from Haggar’s files. There were many, and they weren’t pretty at all. Here and there were some humanoid subjects, but many of them looked like what they were: various strands of wildly different DNA shoved together to produce something nature never intended.

“These are the products of the Jojeeli and Maasqui Projects. She could clone originals fine, but as soon as she started splicing in other genes the majority of her specimens came out as unusable mutations. Because they were so unstable, even cloning one of the successful ones didn’t guarantee the same result. She had no way of mass producing, every one had to be individually made and manipulated as it formed to make sure it wasn’t useless at the end.”

“She only ever had six usable subjects from the Jojeeli Project, and only three from the Maasqui Project,” Lotor read. “So how did she have so many successes with the Kuron Project?”

“Well, apparently, no matter what you mix with a human it will always look like a human,” Kuro answered, pulling up that page of the research. “Humans aren’t particularly special, but every species has one or two unique traits not found in others. For humans, it’s that their phenotype always shows. No matter what Haggar mixed in, the basic human blueprint was always solid enough to produce a viable copy that could pass as a human.

“That’s what made the Kuron Project her final success. She’s trying to build an army of super soldiers, one she can churn out in large numbers, and the human genome was the one ingredient she needed. She can mix almost anything she wants in there, and as long as a certain percentage of the genetic code is human it will work. Of course, she still needs her research to do that, and we made sure to destroy her databases, so…”

“So she’s going to be looking for you,” Lotor finished for him. “And Shiro. You two are the only remaining seeds she has to make further copies from, and she likely believes we didn’t make copies of her research before destroying it. Dragging in new humans and starting from scratch to try and get the percentages right again is simply far too time consuming now that the war is starting.”

“We’re going to have to actually destroy the data, you know,” Kuro frowned, looking at the pages of information up on the screen. “Learn whatever we can from it and then get rid of it. We can’t risk her coming across a copy of it.”

“No, we can’t,” Lotor agreed. “Especially not now that she’s found a way to make them worse.”

Kuro glanced over at him, and Lotor nodded toward the curtain Adam was currently sleep behind.

“The reason she wanted to keep Adam alive and close is so she could add Nixa DNA into the mix once she got you back, which would be catastrophic. Imagine if she could mass produce super soldiers that hunted that efficiently in packs _and_ had the ability to hypnotize.”

“I don’t know, that just seems like overkill,” Kuro frowned. “That wouldn’t be invading and colonizing a planet to take over, that would be wiping out life on it entirely. After a while the only subjects she’d even have would be her army of clones.”

“This is Haggar we’re talking about. She doesn’t care about life, she only cares about quintessence. The question is just how this army of soldiers ties into that.”

Kuro sighed and ran a hand through his hair, almost regretting waking up that morning. Life was suddenly much more difficult than it had been a few hours ago, with a healthy dose of terrifying thrown in.

“Well, now that you’re settled in and you’ve effectively scared the hell out of me, I might have a little bit of good news,” he supposed, motioning for Lotor to follow.

They left the lab with Hoshi following curiously after them, going two doors down in the hall to a room lined with healing pods. He turned on the lights, illuminating the three bodies settled peacefully in cryosleep.

“Bandor,” Lotor said in surprise, approaching one of the pods.

“You know him?”

“Yes, he’s a pilot,” Lotor answered, looking at the other two. “And this is Maya and Keela. They’re all gifted, they were all on the second colony. How did they get here?”

“After you first left me here, I was paranoid and kept a lookout for anyone who might be coming,” Kuro admitted. “One of the signal scanners I’d set out picked up a small Galra ship coming, but the quantum warp gave me about a day to work before they actually got here. I got the patients that were still here out of the cryo pods where Acxa had stored them and two were pilots, so I sent them on to the second colony to let them know that you had disappeared and to lay low.”

“That was likely the Blade of Marmora,” Lotor mused. “Acxa said Keith had sent someone here, but that they had found nothing. I assumed it meant Haggar had gotten here first.”

“No, I cleaned house,” Kuro answered, coming to stand beside Lotor. “Then about four months ago the ship made it back, this time with these three. The ship was beat up pretty bad and they were all hurt, not to mention drained from overextending…I’m guessing they were fighting with alchemy. All I managed to get out of the guy there was that they were a scout crew sent to see what the situation was and they’d gotten caught up in the battlefield between here and the colony. I got them into the pods and then kept them asleep while I tried to locate Acxa, someone at the waystation had seen her pass through.”

“The faction wars have basically ruined space,” Lotor grimaced, running a hand through his hair. “The second colony is currently cut off by ongoing war zones. That can change now, since we have a runner that’s equipped with a teludav and wormholes can get us through…we didn’t have that before I got the specs for it from the Castle of Lions.

“But that will have to wait. I don’t have much time, I need to finish what I came here to do and get back. Wake them up, three fully grown alchemists are certainly a welcome addition to our sorry ranks.”

Kuro nodded and began entering the sequence to thaw and wake the cryopod occupants as Lotor left to return to his work in the lab. There had been plenty of days over the last fifteen years that he’d wished for something exciting to happen, but he hadn’t expected for those fifteen years worth of wishes to all come crashing down into a condensed six hours of action.

It appeared his vacation was over.


	16. Chapter 16

Lance woke up for no particular reason, as had become his habit since the Last Stand. He tended to sleep a few hours, wake, and go back to sleep for a few more on a mostly regular basis, a result of war taking its toll on his nerves.

He lifted his head to sleepily take in his surroundings, the unfamiliar quarters and the other body splayed out next to him. Keith had rolled over onto his back and stretched out at some point, the calling card of an only child who had never fallen asleep in the same bed as multiple siblings. His mouth was hanging open slightly and his hair was out of his face for once, making him look almost innocent.

Lance carefully got out of bed, regretting it immediately. The bunker wasn’t cold, but lying curled up against Keith’s side had been warm and comfortable. Lance gently laid the blanket back over the other Paladin, regarding him briefly as he slept.

Keith had been through a lot. Even as a kid back at the Garrison Lance had known that. It was a well-known secret that Keith had come to the academy from a group home, that he was too uncontrollable to have a foster family or be adopted. It didn’t excuse the fact that he had been a raging jerk, but it did explain it.

Lance had often wondered where Keith had gone after his expulsion, that hadn’t been common knowledge. He had asked Adam if he knew once only to be told that Keith was “fine” and not to worry about it. He had deduced that Adam was keeping an eye on Keith from a distance in deference to Shiro’s memory.

After all that, then had come Keith’s loss of Shiro a second time in the fight against Zarkon, followed by basically being forced into the Black Lion. Lance had wanted that position, he had trained harder in the Garrison and always aimed for leadership, Keith just wanted to be left alone. It had not been a fair change for either of them, the only saving grace was that Keith actually listened when Lance contributed things he had learned.

The Blade had been tough on Keith as well. Lance had worried every time he went on a mission with them, counted down the hours until he returned so he could see with his own eyes that he was okay. Their mantra of “the mission above all else” had always bothered Lance; people were the reason _to_ fight, when people simply became a resource to win the fight then the war was already half lost. As much as he admired Kolivan, Lance had not trusted the Blade to go out of their way to bring Keith home safely at the end of the day.

Lance crossed his arms and leaned quietly against the wall at the head of the bed, watching Keith sleep. He looked very different than he had a few weeks ago, now that his memory was starting to come back. The mark on his cheek, the stripe that had been exposed by coming too close to Shiro’s sword, was much more vivid and ran down his neck toward his back. It had a matching one on the other side, making him look all the more like his mother, and when Keith’s eyes were open his normally violet irises were a darker purple and framed in yellow.

And his hair, which Lance now reached down to lightly touch, curling a lock around his finger, faded from black on the top to a wine-color down near his neck much like Krolia’s. That was definitely different, and very noticeable since it looked like Keith was really growing his hair out long now.

Lance liked it. All of it. He liked Keith fine before, but he also liked how he looked now. Lance had never been bothered by the idea of Keith being part Galra, right from the beginning he’d just accepted it. He’d had no reason not to, Keith had never said or done anything to make himself suspect, finding out his DNA was a little wonky meant nothing. If anything it just helped explained why the walking mullet was so weird half the time.

Grabbing his shirt, Lance let himself quietly out of the room so he wouldn’t wake the other pilot before he was ready. He passed the open door to a bathroom and ducked in just to check his reflection, smoothing down his bed head and frowning at the face looking back at him.

The lavender hair and red facial marks were not Lance McClain. He was not Altean, he was Cuban born and American raised. What was looking back at him was an insult in a way, an erasure of who he was and where he really came from. He did not share life experiences with the majority of people here in the bunker no matter how much like them he looked right now.

Lance stared at his reflection and concentrated. After a moment the lavender bled back into coppery brunette and the red gave way to smooth brown. He left his eyes alone, they weren’t worth the effort, but at least now he found himself looking back at him again and not some alien stranger.

He wondered if it would be like this for the rest of his life, if he’d have to wake up every morning and hide what was really there under a manipulated mask. It kind of sucked that he probably would, but at least he was able to do it. And if he got tired of it, maybe he could just dye his hair. That would cover the most glaring difference at least, and then he wouldn’t have to worry about losing the camouflage and people seeing.

It was all like a terrible scar. It wasn’t like he had any reason to take pride in the new features, and seeing them only reminded him of the terrible things he’d done.

Lance splashed a little bit of water on his face and ran damp fingers through his hair, taking one last look to make sure he appeared as normal as possible before he stepped back out into the quiet hall and headed back toward the cafeteria.

Everything was creepy and empty, doors to quarters sealed up while their occupants slept. Sleep had come in turns for everyone on the ship, a few hours at a time before shifts switched so that half of them were always awake and alert if necessary. Here, in this place all but forgotten by time, they were safe for the moment.

It was the first time Lance had felt safe in a while, but he didn’t really think it was the bunker. It was having Keith nearby, and Shiro and Allura and his big sister.

He grabbed a bottle of water and two ration packets and continued on his way, taking his time as he headed back to the hangar. Stopping at windows to look into dark offices, wandering into the empty break room that hadn’t seen anyone in thousands of years. He peeled back the drop cloth from a sofa and flopped down to open one of the packets, taking that moment of quiet to close his eyes and reach out.

Lance felt her there, waiting peacefully on the moon circling the planet. Red was close, so very close, and it made him indescribably happy to be able to feel her presence again.

He stayed in the dark break room for a few minutes, nibbling more for something to do than because he was hungry, waiting to be tired enough to lay back down. When that didn’t happen he got back up and continued on to the hangar, figuring he could find something to do on the Lorelia until the others woke up. The spotlights from the ship and the Lions had been turned off as he stepped out into the open space, but the few lights shining around the edge of the big room gave him enough to see by.

He was halfway to the ship when he glanced toward the Lions and saw the dim lights reflecting off something glaring white at the foot of Black. As he got closer he could see that it was Paladin armor; Shiro was leaning back against one of Black’s paws, staring off at nothing in the dark.

“Hey,” Lance called softly, changing direction. He hadn’t been quiet in his approach but he still seemed to catch Shiro off guard. “Just me. Did you even get any sleep?”

“I’m not tired,” Shiro answered, glancing up at the rooftop door where the sounds of the storm sounded as if they’d finally passed. Lance assumed there was still some kind of interference on the planet, otherwise Shiro would have come to let them know the Lions would be able to hail the Atlas. “I figured I’d keep watch.”

He made it sound like he was keeping an eye out for Galra attackers, but Lance knew better. He was waiting for Lotor and Adam to come back, to see with his own eyes that Adam was alive and well and okay. Lance pulled himself up to sit on Black’s paw next to him, offering the second unopened rations packet. Shiro started to wave it off at first then changed his mind, glancing up at Lance’s face as he took it.

“No more marks,” Shiro noted.

“I don’t like them,” Lance answered, absently kicking his feet. “They’re…Honerva said I was a descendant of her sister. I don’t know if she was telling the truth or not but the coloring is way too close for comfort, and the last thing I want to see when I look in the mirror are that witch’s marks painted on my face.”

“Merla,” Shiro answered. “That was Honerva’s sister. She was a good friend of Alfor’s, Coran told us. She and Queen Melenor brought the Blue Lion to Earth ten thousand years ago…it’s a really long story. But Merla seemed like a good woman who fought hard in the war, I don’t think that sounds like an ancestor to be ashamed of.”

“Well, I’ll stop hiding it when the rest of my family magically breaks out in purple hair and face marks,” Lance scoffed. “And when it doesn’t remind everyone of…last week.”

He looked down at his kicking feet, unsure of how to say what he wanted. He didn’t have any way of leading into it that wasn’t blunt, and he hadn’t really thought about what he was going to say before now. A quiet moment with Shiro had seemed like something that would be weeks away or more, this was kind of unexpected.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “For everything. I know it’s not going to magically fix everything, that the damage done to the Atlas won’t just go away. God, Shiro, I almost killed you. I know I did, I was _trying_ to.”

“Yeah, you almost did,” Shiro agreed, absently popping a piece of something from the packet into his mouth. “I’ll be honest with you, for a second back there I thought it was over for me. The only thing that saved me was that Allura had just given me upgraded armor, if I’d been wearing the old stuff I’d be dead right now. But if you’re worried about how the whole thing will affect me, don’t. I’m fine.”

“How can you be fine after that?” Lance asked, looking down at his hands. “I lied, I shot at my own people, I wrecked our only war ship. I did more damage than the enemy ever got a chance to, because I led them right into the heart of one of our biggest weapons. I just let Honerva lead me around without even stopping to wonder why I would have fought on your side if you were the bad guys. That whole thing was so—”

“Lance.”

He stopped talking and forced himself to look up. Shiro was looking at him, his face showing concern.

“When I was fighting you, when I got close, you looked terrified of me. From my standpoint, it wasn’t you attacking me. We talk about these Alteans as being child soldiers, but you’re barely eighteen and that’s what I saw you as. I know you, I knew you wouldn’t be doing it if you hadn’t been convinced by Honerva somehow that it was the right thing. I’m not traumatized by it. One more close call on top of a thousand other close calls, that’s all.”

“That’s one hell of a close call,” Lance murmured. “And most of them don’t come from people you thought you could trust.”

“You know, Lance, you’re not going to convince me to be as hard on you as you’re being on yourself. Maybe I wasn’t in control of this body when it turned on everyone, but I remember what it did. You almost killed me? I remember almost killing all of you. Keith still has nightmares, sometimes there are days when he’s not comfortable letting me get close. So I know where you’re coming from, and when I tell you I’m fine I mean that I’m fine.”

It was good, of course, that Shiro didn’t have more unnecessary distress on top of everything he’d already been through, but Lance didn’t want him to just be fine with everything. He didn’t want to be forgiven so easily, he didn’t feel like he deserved it. None of the others would have given in so easily. None of them would have let themselves be brainwashed and turned on their friends. And Shiro’s example didn’t count because he was right, that _hadn’t_ been him at the time.

Shiro crumpled up the empty rations packet and looked up at the landing door again. Lance followed his gaze, and knew he was worrying.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to make things sound bad when I told you about Adam earlier,” he said, feeling even more guilty. If he hadn’t been so excited to see everyone he would have policed his words better.

“It’s okay. I’m ready for him to not want to speak to me, I just need to see for myself that he’s all right.”

“No, no no no,” Lance backpedaled, reaching over to put a hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “That isn’t what I meant! Of course he’ll want to talk to you, do you have any idea…listen, we both know how he is, right? That he’s all attitude on the outside but a kitten on the inside? Well, the kitten got out of the house in the middle of winter and it got chased by a dog and now it’s hiding up in the wheel well of a truck and won’t come out.”

Shiro looked over at him and raised his eyebrows, the metaphor obviously going over his head.

“You’ve never tried to catch an escaped cat, have you?” Lance asked.

“No. Can't you just open the hood on a truck and take the kitten out?” Shiro replied.

“Do…do you know what the wheel well is?”

“Of course I do,” Shiro scoffed, looking away, across the hangar at the Blue Lion. “It’s the…well for the…wheel.”

“It’s exactly the same thing on a truck as it is on a plane. How do you not know that?” Lance frowned. But the answer came to him immediately after he said it. It was entirely possible that Shiro had never been at a point in his life when he wasn’t surrounded by people who could take care of those things for him, he didn’t need to know how a truck worked. He only needed to know how planes and shuttles worked. “No, wait, let me guess…Adam handled the cars.”

“He’s the engineer,” Shiro defended. “Machines are his thing, of course he handled the cars. I drove things, he fixed things.”

“Can you even change a flat tire?”

“Look, changing oil and fixing engines doesn’t make him the town genius,” Shiro answered. “He took care of maintenance stuff, I handled the finances. If you think he’s so smart, ask him how much grapes cost.”

Lance took that to mean that Shiro couldn’t actually change a flat tire, which for some reason was one of the funniest things he’d ever heard. Even Veronica and Rachel could do it, and they had three brothers around to do it for them. This was Takashi Shirogane, famed fighter pilot, former pilot of the Black Lion, and current Captain of the IGF Atlas.

“…can Keith change a flat tire?”

“We have AAA.”

Nope. Keith couldn’t change a flat tire either. This was a travesty.

“Okay, forget the tire and the wheel well,” Lance tried to steer the conversation back on track.

“What about the kitten?”

“The kitten is dead,” Lance answered. “It’s the middle of winter and you don’t know how to get up into the wheel well on a truck, you killed the kitten. Forget the kitten. What I was trying to say was that Adam cares more than a lot of people do about a lot of stuff, and he’s kind of a mess after the last year and a half. So it’s not you that he doesn’t want to see, he’s just got walls up. He didn’t even want to talk about Earth, and that was a pretty neutral topic…I think he just won’t relax until he’s somewhere safe with the things he loves and they can’t be taken away again.”

A guilty look flitted across Shiro’s face, and Lance felt bad about his wording. He had meant Honerva as the taker, but Kerberos was probably on the older Paladin’s mind. Lance was proven correct when Shiro spoke next.

“You guys have been pretty close for a while?” He asked. Lance nodded. “How…was he? After the news of the Kerberos crash?”

This was not going to be pretty, and Lance knew it. He had a feeling Shiro was looking for a way to torment himself more, perhaps not unlike how Lance just wanted to wallow in guilt over what he’d done on the Atlas. The two of them certainly made a sad, sorry pair.

“He wasn’t great,” Lance said carefully. “He never really got into details with me about your relationship, he never thought it was right to discuss it with students, but I knew you guys were together and that he was really happy. He changed a little after you left for Kerberos. Not with me, but he was a lot less nice to other people for a while. He was starting to get back to normal when the Garrison announced the crash, it went downhill then.”

“Commander Duchesne told me he went MIA afterward,” Shiro pressed.

“He was gone a couple days,” Lance confirmed. He tried to think of the best possible way to tell Shiro what he wanted to know, wanting to give him the answers he was looking for but at the same time not wanting to paint such a dismal picture that Shiro was overwhelmed with guilt over something he had no control over.

“I thought he was just taking a break out in the cliffs where he liked to go, but then the rumors started that he’d disappeared. He seemed okay when he came back, when I asked where he was he just told me he’d been resting and that he was fine now. Iverson made him go to the Kerberos memorial service then arranged an excused long weekend, then after that he started leaning on him really hard.”

“Adam get in trouble a lot?” Shiro asked, glancing over at him.

“Not at first, but after a while he was feeling good enough to start driving Iverson up a wall on purpose,” Lance answered with a slight shrug. “He got pulled off of reserve and transferred into your spot to lead your unit, they gave him your call sign and everything, but on top of that he got three more classes to teach. He was going non-stop and at first I thought maybe he was being punished, but after a while being so busy seemed to make him…better. Like, he relaxed a little and he started getting nicer again. Started to care again, you know?

“One day I stopped by his office and he had that photo of you two in uniform on the tarmac back out on his desk. I thought he’d thrown it away, but he had it in a nice frame right at the corner where he could see it easy. And sometimes when I’d talk to him after hours he’d be wearing one of your shirts. But not in a sad way or anything. It’s hard to explain. He had a therapist he talked to a lot, that seemed to be helping too. When we were out at that shack of Keith’s I was trying to call him but I couldn’t get a signal, I knew he’d want to see you. And he knew those cliffs really well, he could have helped us.”

“Yes, he could have,” Shiro agreed. He looked up at Blue, letting out a heavy breath through his nose. “We found out some things while you were missing. Like the fact that all of you were already chosen to pilot your Lions before Allura ever assigned them. You were always meant to be in Red, and Adam was supposed to be the blue Paladin. We found evidence that he’d already found Blue, he left a pair of his glasses in her cavern.”

“You’re kidding,” Lance said in surprise, sliding down off Black’s paw to look across the hangar at Blue. “He was supposed to be a Paladin?”

“Instead of me,” Shiro nodded. “You and Keith aren’t the only aliens in the group either. Hunk and Pidge ran tests, you all have alien DNA. So does Adam. I only know the basics though, so I’ll let them fill you in on it later. They and Keith even figured out you were Altean before you showed up on the Atlas.”

Lance felt Shiro’s hand on his shoulder and looked up at him, finding his expression unusually somber. Even as one of the more grown members of the group Shiro still managed to not be too serious most of the time.

“We were all worried about you,” Shiro told him. “I know you probably went through hell, but please don’t doubt that we never stopped looking. Hunk and Pidge and Allura and Veronica, they never gave up trying to find some way to find you, and Keith was on a whole new level after you disappeared.”

Lance had never really thought about what the others were doing, to be honest. He had been a little bit preoccupied and spent a lot of the time too scared to think about much at all. He hadn’t expected just how good it was to hear that they hadn’t forgotten him, that they’d never stopped searching.

Shiro’s comm beeped then and he pulled up his wrist screen to look. From his vantage point all Lance could really see was something blinking red.

“What’s that?”

“The Black Lion picked up a tracking signal,” Shiro answered, frowning. “There were two when we came to find you, yours and a secondary one that was hidden under yours until we got close enough for them to diverge. It stopped shortly after we landed, but now it’s being picked up again.”

Lance leaned around Shiro to look, scanning the screen. It was a pretty basic star map similar to the one he’d seen on the Lorelia’s bridge that laid out the system they were currently in, but this one also showed a few systems over. The blinking red light wasn’t regular either, it had a strange pattern to it. Four flashes, half a beat pause, and a fifth flash. It did this three times before giving only four flashes, then beginning the pattern over again.

He had no idea what he was really looking at or what Black could be tracking. But Shiro was staring pretty intently, like there was something the pattern reminded him of but he couldn’t quite remember. After a moment he pressed a few buttons, and the hangar echoed with sounds. The tracker wasn’t a single signal, it was several frequencies mixed together in one, and Lance frowned as he listened to it all the way through.

“Is that…You Are My Sunshine?” He asked as the pattern started to repeat.

Shiro abruptly turned it off, accessing his comms instead.

“Keith, Allura, I need one of you in the hangar. I have to go. Now.”

* * * * * * * * * *

It took too long for the other Paladins to get back to the hangar, even though it was probably less than a minute. Keith was still pulling on his rerebraces when he arrived, close on the heels of Allura who was wide awake and ready to go. Shiro figured she was probably in the same boat as him right now, too distraught over life in general to really lay down and sleep.

Veronica and Romelle were right behind her, with Veronica also still trying to get back into armor as she walked while still shouldering her gun.

Lance had wanted to know what was going on, but Shiro had gently cut him off and refused to share. He migrated over to Keith’s side as the others reached them, all of them looking confused but battle ready.

“What’s going on?” Allura asked, looking between Shiro and Lance. “Did the Galra pick up on us?”

“No,” Shiro shook his head. “At least, I don’t think so. Keith and I picked up a second tracking signal besides Lance’s when we found the others, and now that signal is back again. I need to follow it.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Keith answered, glancing around. “Everyone is accounted for now. That signal was either a glitch or it’s some kind of trap.”

“It’s not either,” Shiro answered. He hated to do this to them, but until he knew more he couldn’t give them answers. “Look, I can’t give you details yet, but I need to get out there and see what’s going on with it.”

Keith and Allura looked at each other. At this point Shiro didn’t care who gave him a lift, he just wanted to get to the bottom of this. There was no question in his mind that the signal was coming from Adam, and he knew Adam was with Lotor. Lotor, who he had yet to speak to and only had the words of Lance, James, and Romelle to assure him he wasn’t an enemy.

None of them were reliable sources at this point. Shiro respected all three of them, but Lotor had wrapped the Paladins around his finger before.

“I’ll take you,” Allura spoke up first, after exchanging a meaningful glance with Keith. Shiro wasn’t an idiot, he knew what it meant; they didn’t trust his judgement right now any more than he trusted Lance’s yet. “Blue is smaller, she’s less likely to be noticed by those cruisers. While we’re gone we should probably call in the Atlas and have them on standby somewhere close. I’ll feel more comfortable with all of the Lions together.”

“I’ll stay here,” Veronica offered. “If anything happens, I’ll just hitch a ride with Lance when he calls the Red Lion.”

“Oh good, the queen of the backseat drivers will be with me,” Lance said dryly.

“Someone needs to be, I’ve seen you drive,” Shiro heard Keith murmur as he and Allura headed across the hangar toward Blue.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Allura waited until they were out of earshot to speak. “You know I would follow you anywhere, but you seem very shaken right now. I’d appreciate knowing what’s going on.”

Shiro stopped walking, catching her by the arm and pulling her to a stop with him. He glanced back over his shoulder to make sure the others weren’t near.

“The signal isn’t a straight signal, it’s got a code embedded,” he said softly. “It’s from Adam.”

“Adam…who is with Lotor,” Allura followed Shiro’s reasoning, looking away. “And you want to be cautious.”

“I want to be cautious,” Shiro agreed. “I’m not saying he’s lying to everyone Allura, they’re all very convinced he’s telling the truth. This colony just existing is proof that we don’t have all the answers we thought we did. But this is from Adam, it was coded specifically for me, and I need to go find out what’s going on.”

“All right,” Allura sighed and started walking again. “I understand. He’s been gone a very long time and he’s telling you he needs to see you, if it’s desperate enough that he’s sending you a code then—”

Allura hit the limit of the Blue Lion’s immediate reach and was cut off as Blue’s particle barrier suddenly went up, leaving her to walk into it and stumble a little. Shiro caught her before she fell backwards, exclamations of surprise coming from behind them as the hangar was lit with the ghostly blue glow.

“What’s going on?” He heard Veronica say as Allura regained her balance. “Why is her shield up?”

“Well, this complicates things,” Allura said softly.

Shiro pulled his eyes away from the disagreeable Lion to look down at her. Her expression was a mix of sadness and resignation, as if this was something she had been expecting and waiting for. She felt him looking and turned her head away slightly.

“She was always going to want her own Paladin eventually,” she shrugged, obviously trying to hide her hurt behind nonchalance. “She must know he’s near. Perhaps she intends to wait here until he calls.”

“Wait, that’s not fair,” Lance reached them then with Keith right behind, pressing against Blue’s particle barrier with both hands before knocking on it as if that might do something. “Adam’s not here, and we don’t even know if he wants to be a Paladin! What if he’s not interested? We still need Allura!”

“You already know that’s not going to work, it didn’t work when Blue sent you over to Red either,” Keith pointed out as Lance pounded lightly on the particle barrier with one hand. “She also didn’t care at that point that we were in big trouble, I doubt she cares now.”

“That was different,” Lance protested. “Red called me and Blue took Allura. There is no other pilot here for her to take right now.”

Shiro looked up at the Blue Lion, disappointment washing over him. This was a problem, and he wasn’t going to be able to leave while they tried to get this sorted. Lance was right, they needed Allura for as long as they could possibly have her pilot, even if Adam was near there was no way he was going to master flying her before the next possible Galra attack. That was if he was in any condition to pilot at all, from Lance’s concern it sounded like he was sick.

Veronica’s scream echoed through the hangar, making everyone jump and spin around. She was scuttling backwards away from Sincline as the mech started to move of its own accord, shifting forward to lower itself closer to the ground. There was a soft hiss and the top ship’s cockpit opened, giving access to the pilot seat.

The hangar fell silent and they all stared in disbelief. It was Romelle who recovered first, turning away from the mech to look at Allura.

“Remember last night, when I told you Sincline wanted you and not Lotor?” She asked. “Well, I think Opal is done waiting.”

“Opal?” Shiro asked, staring up at the giant machine. “Wait, are you trying to tell me this thing is sentient too?”

“They weren’t when we built the final ship,” Allura answered. “But it’s very possible we picked something up after we went through the rift gate. The quintessence field isn’t what most people think it is, it’s teeming with life. Different life from here, but life just the same.”

She hesitated when Romelle motioned for her to come forward, but then slowly crossed the hangar to join the other Altean. Closing her eyes, she rested her hands on the hull of the mech’s topmost ship.

“There are three,” she said after a moment.

“Are they the same as the Lions?” Keith asked. “Not that we even know what they really are at this point.”

“No, they’re not,” Allura frowned. A soft glow surrounded her hands as she dipped deeper into the quintessence within the ship’s trans-reality metal, pressing for answers. “They’re from a different place, and they’re much younger. They had been separated from their brood and exposed, it was dangerous. They heard Lotor and I passing by and felt like the ship was a safe place.”

The glow faded and she let her hands fall away, looking up at the ship. Shiro could tell she had been thinking of the Sincline as Lotor’s, before this moment it hadn’t crossed her mind that she had helped build it and had as much of a claim to it as anyone. Whatever was in there, it knew her and it had been waiting.

“The top one is Opal,” Romelle was telling Keith and Lance, who had wandered over to look. “It’s a he. Jade in the middle there is mine, she’s a she. And Carnelian is another he, he’s down on the bottom there.”

“So it only takes three pilots?” Veronica asked.

“Well, it’s only three ships. But they can all carry a copilot for travel.”

Veronica reached over and knocked lightly on the side of the mech, in a way that reminded Shiro very much of the first time Lance had seen the Blue Lion.

“Hey there,” she practically purred. “I don’t suppose you’ve got an opening for a classy, single Caribbean lady who’s looking for a good time?”

“Does your whole family flirt with machines?” Keith whispered to Lance.

“No,” Lance countered. “Nadia and Silvio are too young.”

Romelle and Veronica were chuckling a little over Veronica’s joke, neither of them actually expecting anything to happen. They were both surprised when the lower ship’s cockpit let out a hiss and opened as well.

“What? No way!” Lance exclaimed, immediately striding forward. “You cannot help pilot a mech, it’s dangerous!”

“Says my baby brother who helps pilot a mech!” Veronica returned.

Shiro groaned as they started arguing, leaning back against Blue’s particle barrier. They had suddenly gone from five Lions with four pilots two weeks ago to eight mechs in total with potentially eight pilots. Three of which were completely untested in combat and completely necessary for them to be fully functional. Though he supposed it was possible for Allura to catch up quickly on how to pilot the Sincline in battle alone, if Lotor could do it she certainly could.

“I don’t suppose you could give me a ride to go find your Paladin while they’re fighting?” He asked Blue.

Like Veronica, he had not expected a response. So when Blue’s barrier suddenly went down Shiro found himself sprawled backwards on the hangar floor, nearly having a heart attack as he watched the Lion’s head lower toward him from his odd angle. He sat up quickly and cringed away as her loading ramp came down, settling just inches from where he sat. Across the hangar, the others stopped arguing to turn and see what was going on.

“I…guess we’re playing Musical Ships again,” Keith supposed, looking back and forth between the Sincline and Blue without even trying to hide his bewilderment.

“Not for long,” Shiro answered, scrambling to his feet and bounding up the ramp. He wasn’t about to pass up Blue’s offer. “We’re going to go find her pilot.”

He started for the cockpit but took a quick detour, throwing open the weapon locker in Blue’s cargo hold. He pulled out the teal spare armor and grabbed the blue armor that was stowed, returning to the hangar.

“Romelle, you’re going to need this. Lance, this is yours,” he called, offering the pile.

“Change quickly,” Allura told Romelle, her uncertainty starting to pass and her confidence beginning to return. She was a leader, she always had been, and Shiro was glad to see this little hiccup wasn’t about to slow her down. “The Sincline is going to accompany the Blue Lion. Black and Red can remain here on standby while we put out a call to the Atlas to get Green and Yellow here.”

“Sure.”

Keith took Allura’s order with far more ease than Shiro had expected, likely because he was basically being told to remain here and keep an eye on Lance. He and Romelle both went into the Lorelia to change, returning a few minutes later in the new armor. Before Shiro could climb back into Blue Allura came over, offering him the blue bayard.

“This belongs to the Blue Lion’s Paladin,” she said wistfully, handing it over with some reluctance. “I suppose once we’re back I’m going to have to make some new bayards as well.”

“The more the merrier,” Shiro answered. He gave her a little smile and boarded, making his way into Blue’s unfamiliar cockpit and settling in the pilot seat.

He had only been in here once, when Lance had piloted them away from Earth and through the wormhole that would take them to Arus and start them on the path that would ultimately bring them here. So much had happened since then, they had all been through so many hardships and were now such different people. Tired people, jaded people. Soldiers.

All of the Lions seemed to have different controls, but Blue’s weren’t so different from Black that it was impossible to figure out. He opened his comm channels to the Sincline, bringing the three girls up on his side viewscreen. This was going to be interesting.

Down below, Lance was opening the hangar gate and raising the platform. As he did so Shiro made note of the weather patterns coming up. The storm was gone but a fresh one looked to be forming right nearby, likely the reason their communications still weren’t working right, and the valley the bunker entrance sat in was filled with mist.

“I’m trying to scan for those two cruisers, but there’s interference,” Shiro told Allura. “Any luck on your end?”

“None. I’m having the same problem,” she sighed. “Perhaps our best bet is to just take off at full speed, if they do pick us up we’ll probably be well out of the atmosphere by the time they do and they won’t be able to pinpoint our origin.”

“Well, it’s not like we have any other plan,” Shiro supposed. “On three, then. One…two…”

He pushed Blue’s accelerator straight to its highest setting, and beside him the Sincline shot into the air as well. He lost his visual on the mech as soon as they hit the mist, and from the way all three other pilots appeared to be looking around apprehensively he could tell their visuals were terrible too.

They quickly broke out of the mess and into open air, but it was a short-lived victory that very quickly became a nightmare.

There were no longer only two cruisers off in the distance. Drifting through the planet’s atmosphere, scattered and covering as much ground as they could, were what looked like a whole armada of Galran ships.

“Oh no,” Shiro hissed to himself, ripping the controls to the side to avoid slamming into the bottom of a cruiser that was right above where he was ascending. “No no no. This is bad.”

“There’s hundreds,” Allura gasped. “They must either know or suspect the Sincline is here.”

Shiro tried to go around the cruiser above him, but his proximity to the ship had made his location known. A swarm of strikers was beginning to spill out, firing on him from all directions. He hissed out a string of swears that would have made Adam proud and began evasive maneuvers, trying to take out as many as he could without taking damage himself.

On the viewscreen he could see that the others were taking fire as well. Romelle was beginning to panic, and while Veronica was keeping her cool very well she clearly didn’t know how to handle this.

“I’m taking over movement!” Allura shouted suddenly, slapping some of the controls on her console. “Man weapons! Romelle, cover our left, Veronica, cover our right!”

Shiro had to close his visuals to give himself a clear view of what he was fighting, and quickly lost sight of Sincline in the sea of strikers. Blue didn’t handle like Black and it had been a long time since he’d piloted a Lion, his reactions were slow and he took several hits. After a grueling few minutes the strikers began to clear and he thought he had a straight shot upward and away from the planet, but the reality proved to be a heart-stopping realization.

The light he saw wasn’t from the sky. It was a cruiser above him, locked onto him and firing its cannon. Shiro froze, knowing there was no way to avoid it.

Something slammed into him from the side, throwing him out of the way of the cannon beam but into several strikers. He winced as he was thrown around in his seat, trying to get eyes on something he could lock onto and shoot.

“Hold on!” He heard Allura yelling.

The world exploded into a field of white light, the temperature in the cockpit dropping drastically before Blue began to modulate it. His tracking started to go haywire, unable to pinpoint anything it had been reading a moment ago, and the sudden change in what was around him set off several of Blue’s alarms.

As quickly as the light came it disappeared, replaced by the empty blackness of space dotted with far away stars. Blue’s navigation reset itself and the alarms died down, leaving Shiro looking around in confusion as silence settled over the cockpit.

“What…just happened?”

“I took us through the quintessence field,” Allura said quietly. “I…there were too many, we had multiple cannons locked onto us. I panicked.”

“Oh no.” That was beginning to become Shiro’s mantra these days, as he bit back the language he wanted to use in the presence of the girls. He quickly got his bearings, finding they were outside of the planet’s atmosphere and just outside the range of the Galra cruisers. He pulled his communication visuals back up.

“I’m running a scan for anomalies,” Allura’s panic was returning, her fingers flying over her console. “Oh please, please, please…”

“What’s going on?” Veronica looked concerned, pulling up her own scanners to help. Shiro did the same.

“I may have doomed this entire planet.”

“The last time the Sincline was used to pop in and out of the quintessence field it caused tears in the fabric of space time,” Romelle clarified, already scanning as well. “Tears that started to expand, and the only way we managed to close them was by having Allura activate the Castle of Lions’ teludav and destroy everything within a system’s reach of the explosion.”

“It’s what caused the time dilation that kept us away for three extra years,” Shiro added. “And created the crystal that powers the Atlas. Which we still have to get back from Honerva.”

“No, I think Adam still has that,” Romelle answered, frowning at her scanners. “It wouldn’t let anyone else touch it, he had to carry it. Jade’s not picking up anything other than those ships down there.”

“Neither is Carnelian,” Veronica said. “Allura? Anything?”

Allura didn’t answer right away. Blue’s scanners were still running, picking out everything down below and analyzing it, item by item. Shiro watched as outlines of cruisers and scanners came up, flashed in the scan, and disappeared to make way for the next one, holding his breath. It was a long two minutes before his screen went blank, a small line of text coming up in the bottom corner of his viewscreen: _no occurrence detected within given search parameters_.

“There’s nothing,” Allura came to the same conclusion, and Shiro let out the breath he’d been holding, his head falling back against the pilot seat. “One trip in and out must not weaken the reality borders enough to cause a real tear.”

“That planet may not be out of the woods yet,” Shiro warned. He pulled up the results of his scan, mapping the locations of the ships. “That’s a lot of cruisers. They’re moving back to the way they were before they spotted us, that’s got to be a set formation. But I’ve never seen it before.”

“I have,” Allura said darkly. “In the reports of Altea’s final days. Honerva intends to destroy this planet, but why?”

“To punish Lotor, if she can’t get him back,” Romelle frowned. “Or to hold the planet’s well-being over his head to manipulate him if she does. And speaking of Lotor, he’s six hours late for his rendezvous…do you think she found him?”

“I don’t know, but with Lotor or not we need to take care of this,” Shiro didn’t even bother to crunch the numbers, he knew they weren’t good. They had to turn the tide of this. “Allura, Sincline is going to have to stay behind and keep an eye on things here. Without Voltron, it’s the only thing that can effectively take down a good number of these cruisers. If they look like they’re prepping to fire on the planet, just start tearing them out of the sky.

“I’m going to see if I can track down Adam and Lotor. Blue needs her pilot and the Atlas needs that power crystal. I’m going to call in the Atlas and send Green and Yellow your way with parts to repair your long range communications in case the ones from the Abyss facility don’t make it here. Keep trying to get a message down to Keith about what’s going on up here, that new storm is still brewing so there should be spans when the interference is lower.”

“Be careful,” Allura advised. “There are too many things we don’t know right now, it makes me nervous.”

“You’re in good company,” Shiro answered, setting Blue’s navigation toward the tracking signal. “The rest of us are terrified.”

As the planet fell behind and he got more distance between himself and the Galra armada, Shiro opened the Blue Lion’s communication channels. He already knew where the Abyss facility was, Keith and Krolia had long since marked it on confidential maps held only by those on the Atlas and high up in the Blade of Marmora. What he didn’t know was what channel they would be using, or if communications signals would even get through the warped space time.

“This is the Captain of the IGF Atlas, hailing the Lorelia shuttle,” Shiro worded his recording carefully, not wanting to give too much away to any enemy ships that might pick up the message. “Please be advised that there is a Galra armada over Colony One. I repeat, do not approach Colony One. Please make contact with me via frequency channel 81.423, or with the Atlas via frequency channel 42.874.”

He broadcast the message on all of his open channels and then hailed the Atlas. That channel opened with a feed to the bridge, where Curtis was stepping down from the Captain’s dais to join Coran on the call. Next to Coran was Matt, and at the other consoles he could see Ina, Ryan, and Nadia.

“Looks like you got the bridge crewed,” Shiro noted.

“There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there wasn’t enough time for me to really vet anyone else,” Curtis answered, glancing around. Nadia waved cheerfully at Shiro. “We’re currently in orbit, just like you asked.”

“Good. I’m going to send you some coordinates, I need you to wormhole immediately. Bring Pidge and Hunk, things are getting hot and we need all the Lions. Coran, you’ve handled the bridge alone on the Castle in a fight, do you think you could do that with the Atlas?”

“I suppose I could,” Coran looked around at the others as well. “Now that I’ve had a few months to learn her ins and outs. I’d prefer not to, but I could.”

“It’s only a just-in-case question,” Shiro assured him. “I’m currently in the Blue Lion, on my way to hopefully rendezvous with Lotor. Things are getting really weird out here, guys…Allura, Romelle, and Veronica are piloting the Sincline around a small planet nearby and they need all the backup they can get, there’s a Galra armada that they may have to fight. Lance and Keith are there with Black and Red, and James and Acxa are backing them up with a small group of gifted Alteans.”

“…oh,” Curtis was the one to break the surprised silence as everyone on the bridge stared at him. “That doesn’t sound complicated at all.”

“I know it’s a mess, but Allura will give more details when you guys get to her. Sincline’s long range communications are fried and need fixing, and Keith’s on the surface where the planet’s storms cause comm interference. Have Pidge and Hunk get to her with parts,” Shiro requested. “In the meantime…Curtis, Matt, I’m going to need some backup just to be safe. Arm yourselves and be ready after the jump, I’ll pick you up at your arrival point.”

“Sure thing,” Matt was already jumping out of his seat to go get ready. Curtis watched him go and turned back to the screen.

“Okay, then I guess the bridge is yours, Coran,” he patted Coran’s shoulder and followed Matt out.

“I’ll send you the coordinates of the planet once you get here, on my fly-by to pick them up,” Shiro promised. “Blue Lion out.”

He closed the communications and slowed the Lion’s acceleration, bringing her down to a gentle drift as he sent the Atlas his current location and waited for its arrival. It would be a few minutes, or depending on how prepared everyone was it could be up to half an hour. The one issue with the teludav so far was that although the jump crystals Allura created worked, they didn’t always work as instantaneously as an Altean at the helm.

While he waited he checked the signal and was surprised to find it had moved.

The tracker had come up as being located near the Abyss, which had led him to assume it was coming from the facility. Now it was moving away from there, and it was going farther rather than coming closer. Shiro’s first instinct was to go after it at top speed, and it was maddening to force himself not to. With the way everything was going right now he had to wait for backup first, that was not optional.

He looked around the cockpit, trying to find something to distract himself with. After a moment, his eyes fell on the communications console.

If he remembered correctly, the video Keith had shown everyone of Lance first showing Altean marks had been taken from the communications memory drive. Pidge had said something about it having about a running decaphoeb of video, just short of a year. It would only be a year of video from when the Lion was active, not any of the times when it was at rest and unpiloted. If that was the case…

Curiously, Shiro started to play with the controls to try and find a way to play back the video. It took him about ten minutes before he found himself looking at the imagery of himself speaking to Coran, and another five before he figured out how to go back through it all. It wasn’t a single, smooth camera roll, but a new file for every time the Blue Lion had been active.

Shiro went back through, picking files at random. He opened a few to find Allura, a few with Lance. It didn’t look like there as much past that, so his search was probably in vain. In fact, he was doubting he was going to find anything of interest when he went to check the first video but hit the second instead. That one turned out to be all of them in Blue, on their way to Arus.

If that was the case, the first file was the last person who had been in the Blue Lion before they’d found it.

Shiro hesitated to play it. It could be video of Melenor or Merla, or even both, which would be something he didn’t feel comfortable watching before Allura got the chance to see it. On the other hand, it could be something much more recent. Of course, if it was a video of Melenor it would need to be saved, it was at the very end of Blue’s save files and would soon be overwritten by Blue’s current recording. He was going to have to open it and check, for Allura’s sake.

Or so he told himself as he started the video. Some day, he knew, he was going to just have to admit to himself that he was nosy as hell about everything under the sun.

The view of Blue’s cockpit came onscreen, her lights starting up and the door sliding open to admit a curious human man Shiro recognized instantly. He was an unholy mess, covered in rock dust and dirt with bloodied scrapes covering his arms and face. There was chalk dust all over his shirt, a sign that he had been out rock climbing. Adam was always doing that no matter how often Shiro had hinted he might want to stop, it was almost ridiculously dangerous and the sight of him now was just proof of that.

“You’re a ship,” Adam said softly, almost whispering it as he came forward to gingerly sit on the edge of the pilot seat. Once he was down the seat automatically slid forward, startling him. “Oh, shit!”

Shiro couldn’t hold back the small smile at the image. Adam’s wide, shocked eyes, his messy hair, the way his mouth hung open slightly as Blue’s overlays began to flicker to life and her viewscreen turned on. It was…adorable. Adam had always been easy to catch by surprise if he wasn’t paying enough attention, the whole picture was still endearing even after so many years.

He watched while Adam’s eyes flicked over everything, his head tilted curiously like he was listening. Blue communicating with him probably, the same way the Lions had communicated with them all. After a moment one of Adam’s eyebrows rose and he tilted his head the other way. It was like that for a few minutes, with him saying nothing.

Shiro watched every silent second anyway. It had been a very long time since he’d seen that beautiful face—dirty as it was at the moment—alive and moving and breathing. He didn’t look very different from the last time he had seen him in person, Shiro wasn’t sure how exactly to date the video.

“ _Waiting…for what?_ ” Adam asked out loud, in response to something that Blue had conveyed.

That was when Shiro realized he was drunk. He recognized the slur in his words, which was a very bad sign. Adam loved climbing the cliffs but he did respect that it had its dangers, and he would never have been doing it anything other than stone cold sober under normal circumstances.

“ _Soldiers. One for each Lion._ ”

Shiro leaned forward to look closer. Adam was more than drunk, there was a vacancy in his eyes that Shiro had seen once before, back when they were still in school. He’d been high off something in the last few hours.

On top of drinking. While rock climbing. It was amazing he was still in one piece.

“ _I don’t know if I can help you. I mean, I can try. But I’m a teacher, I’m military. I can’t just drop everything and go scouring the world for these special people. But if what you’re telling me is right and they’ll all eventually gather in this area, I can try to look for them._

“ _After that, I don’t think I’m the one you’re looking for. You just missed the world’s best pilot by a few months, he died last week on Kerberos. Takashi was the kind of pilot you want, he was the kind who took risks and didn’t worry about consequences. There’s no way I could just fuck off to space and not constantly wonder if everything was okay here on Earth._ ”

Kerberos. This was the week after the Galra had taken him, when everyone back on Earth had been told the shuttle crashed. This was probably the arranged long weekend Lance had mentioned, Adam had found the Blue Lion shortly after the Galra had first brushed the edges of their solar system.

And Adam had known. Blue had told him about the war, told him there were soldiers. He had known they’d all end up nearby, that they were going to be leaving the planet.

Had Adam been actively looking in the year after that? Had he identified any of the Paladins on his own? Knowing Adam, he would have eventually figured out who they were somehow. And unlike Shiro, he would have been preparing. He wouldn’t have dragged five kids off into the middle of nowhere with no background and no idea what was going on, he would have made sure they had supplies and were armed and were ready.

If Shiro hadn’t gotten there first, and destroyed everything by taking his place.

On the screen Adam had been sitting quietly again. Now he moved, slowly reaching for Blue’s controls as if she’d finally convinced him to give her a try. His hand was on the accelerator, his grip tightening to push it forward, when his phone rang and made him jump.

“ _Jesus Christ, do you improve cell reception too? …hello? Hunk? It’s almost one in the morning. How did you even get my number?_ ”

One in the morning. He’d been rock climbing drunk, high, and at night on top of it. Shiro was beginning to get delayed anxiety as his brain went over every horrible thing that could have happened out on those cliffs. All because Adam had the common sense of a cucumber some days.

“ _Slow down, start from the beginning. Lance is gone? Gone where? …really bad. Define really bad. …oh no. God, that fucking idiot. Shit, Hunk, you didn’t hear me say that…just relax, okay? I’ll find Lance. If anybody notices he’s gone before we’re back, just stall them. Tell them he’s with me going over the flight text or something. I’ll have him call you once I’m with him_.”

Adam was pacing the cockpit now as he hung up the phone and dialed a different number. He didn’t get an answer, prompting him to pace out into the cargo hold and back again when the cockpit didn’t prove to have enough room. He stopped in the middle of the cockpit when he got an answer, leaning against the back of the pilot seat.

“ _Where are you? Why aren’t you in your dorm? …that doesn’t matter, where are you? Are you in a car?_ ” A pause. “ _A guy? Oh my God, you’re hitchhiking? Lance, that is’t safe! That’s like, the complete opposite of safe! Why are you even going anywhere, why didn’t you just call me and tell me something was wrong?_ ”

Shiro couldn’t hear the other side of the exchange, but that was definitely interesting. So something had happened in the week after Kerberos that caused Lance to leave the Garrison.

“ _It doesn’t matter! You should have called me and waited, I would have gotten back to you as soon as your message came through. I will always be there when you need me, Lance. Look, tell the guy you’re with that you got through to somebody who can give you a ride. Have him drop you off somewhere…a gas station, a convenience store, anything that’s open all night. Then you call me and you tell me where you are and you sit there and wait for me to get there. …that’s fine, I’ll drive all night if I have to._ ”

The worry in Adam’s voice, the fear over Lance’s safety…it was one more painful reminder that Shiro honestly hadn’t paid anywhere near enough attention to the people in his life before Kerberos. Adam and Lance were close, it looked like they were as close as Shiro had been with Keith, and yet Shiro had never noticed.

Adam would never betray a student’s confidence by talking about them behind their back, but meaningful connections were very important to him. The way he’d grown up, he latched onto relationships like that and he held onto them tightly, there was no way Adam had actively tried to keep Lance a secret while they were together.

No, the more likely scenario was that Adam had mentioned him on a more general level, probably more than once, but that it hadn’t involved any of the Garrison’s space research projects so Shiro simply hadn’t listened. He had probably tuned it out, like he had most of Adam’s talk about his students.

Because students were boring. Adam’s job was boring. Teaching was simple and a waste of Adam’s potential, with an entire universe up there Shiro had never had a particular interest in hearing about kids here on the ground. It hadn’t mattered that Adam was passionate about it, Shiro hadn’t been able to understand how anyone could be passionate about something so mundane back then.

And that was part of the reason they hadn’t parted on as good of terms as they might have. Because Shiro had believed that Adam was too preoccupied with small, unimportant things to understand the big picture. He’d never bothered to think that maybe they were looking at opposite sides of the page.

“ _Sorry._ ” Adam had finished his phone call and looked around the cockpit, sliding his phone into his pocket. “ _I can’t go off on a space ride right now._ I _have people who are important to me._ ”

The pure bitterness in that sentence cut like a knife, just proving the point more. Shiro watched Adam grab his pack and leave the cockpit, and after a moment Blue’s lights began to dim. They went out, and then the video ended. The screen went back to the file listing.

Shiro hesitated for a moment, then deleted the video. He couldn’t be absolutely sure when Blue would overwrite it, and he wasn’t going to let someone else potentially see Adam in a moment of weakness. Adam would have hated for that to happen.

He sighed and slouched down in his chair, running his new hand through his hair and waiting for the Atlas to arrive.

* * * * * * * * * *

 _ **Years Ago**_ :

“Mr Shirogane, you’re going to report to Lieutenant Commander Micah and Commander Iverson today,” Professor Jensen informed Shiro as he entered his flight class. “They’re at the simulators.”

“What for?” Shiro asked curiously, approaching the desk to take the hall pass she offered him. “Did I do something wrong?”

Second years only used the simulators for flight classes once a week, the rest of the time was spent on theory and all of the sciences they needed to know in order to understand what their instruments were telling them. It was only the third week of the semester, and Shiro couldn’t think of anything he’d done so terribly that he’d need to be sent to the simulator for extra time in the air.

“No, of course not,” she assured him. “You’ve applied for fighter class. Twice a week you’ll be attending a specialized flight class for it, so they can see if you’re up to the challenge of the program before you waste your time with the admissions testing. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you, you’ll do fine.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Shiro took the hall pass and glanced back over his class, looking to see if he could immediately spot anyone else who was being sent. There were two empty seats, but he couldn’t identify them immediately.

He made his way quickly to the simulators, ducking through crowds and around upperclassmen, trying not to be late. He arrived right before the bell rang, slipping in just in time to make his hall pass worthless. There were four others there, one he recognized from his regular flight class and two others he recognized from other classes.

Shiro fell into line, standing at attention in front of the simulators with the other cadets. He could see Iverson and Micah up in the control room talking to another officer, waiting for them all to arrive. Over the course of the next few minutes, four more students came rushing in, all of them panting from having practically run.

As others came in, Shiro maneuvered himself to be at the end of the line. He’d found that with Iverson, the people on the ends tended to get the most attention. It was probably because he assumed they were trying to keep as much out of sight as possible, but it played in Shiro’s favor; he was very good at everything he did, and the longer high ranking eyes were on him the more chances there were for them to notice that.

Iverson and Micah finally came down from the control room, giving them a once-over. He motioned for the other officer with them, a woman, to hand out the small pile of textbooks she carried.

“All right cadets, today—”

Iverson was interrupted as the door opened again, admitting another cadet Shiro didn’t recognize. That wasn’t strange, there were plenty of other students he hadn’t met yet. He had light brown skin and bronzy hair that looked a little too long to be completely regulation, and he wasn’t in any great hurry. In fact, he didn’t look like fighter pilot material at all, Shiro figured he was on the communications specialist track or something and was just in the wrong classroom at the wrong time.

“You’re late, cadet,” Iverson said sharply. The boy finished hanging his messenger bag on a free hook and approached, standing at attention in front of Iverson and Micah. He had his hands behind his back, and Shiro frowned when he saw that he was holding a purple gerber daisy.

“Sir?” He prompted, as if “you’re late” was terribly hard to understand.

“You’re late,” Iverson repeated gruffly. “Showing up late for a class is grounds for disciplinary action, Wolfe.”

“I’m aware of that, sir. That’s why I’m not late.”

Shiro raised his eyebrows. He never would have dreamed of talking back to Iverson, especially not after rolling into a special program class late on the first day. This guy was looking to be discharged before he was even signed up for the military. All of the other cadets watched curiously as Wolfe reached into the pocket of his uniform and pulled out a folded up slip of paper, offering it.

“As all officers are undoubtedly aware, sir, academy regulation 5.3 states that no student shall be admitted into class after the final bell. Except in cases when a valid hall pass is provided by a verified instructor, which allows for the student to arrive no more than ten minutes past the beginning of class. That’s why I’m only,” the boy paused, looking at his watch, “Nine minutes and thirty five seconds past the bell. Sir.”

Iverson gave him a look Shiro couldn’t read, the kind of look that would make any of the rest of them squirm. It did nothing as far as he could tell, the boy on the receiving end looked calmly back and didn’t speak further without permission.

“Line up, cadet,” Iverson said finally.

“Yes, sir. May I address Lieutenant Commander Micah?”

Iverson closed his eyes briefly, the action of a man who had undoubtedly dealt with this boy before many, many times. Shiro was at a loss as to how he was even still standing there; his attitude was ridiculous and he should have been put out of the class.

“Yes, fine. Whatever, Wolfe, just get in line.”

The boy withdrew the flower from behind his back and offered it to Micah, smiling charmingly.

“I heard your daughter had a baby this weekend. Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander.”

Shiro scoffed quietly. Why did a cadet even know that an officer had a daughter? He decided he didn’t like this guy very much, especially when she smiled and took the flower.

“Thank you, Adam. Line up.”

“Yes ma’am.”

 _Adam_. What the hell. This guy had walked in here late, quoted regulations at a Commander, gotten _away_ with it, and then had another senior officer call him by his first name. Now Shiro really didn’t like Adam, he was obviously the worst kind of suck up. He was probably only even here because he was related to somebody important.

Adam joined the line right next to Shiro, giving him an amiable smile that Shiro returned with an unimpressed look. Now that he could see him better it was even worse; Adam was one of those annoying pretty boys the girls were always falling all over, and the girl on Shiro’s other side leaned out to wave at him shyly when Iverson wasn’t looking. Adam winked at her, making Shiro wish he could just bash their heads together and not be stuck between them.

The other officer finished handing out the texts, which were relatively small paperbacks that went over the fighter pilot curriculum and everything that was required to qualify for it. Once they each had one they were assigned to simulators, and Micah and Iverson returned to the control room.

“There is no specific lesson for today,” Micah told them over the comms as they settled in. Shiro was irritated to find Adam was in the simulator next to his, humming something and not seeming to be listening at all. “You’re all very new to the simulators and flight, so today we’re going to let you take some time to get used to the controls.

“What we do in this case is play a war game…simulators one through five are the Red Team, simulators six through ten are the Blue Team. On your screens you’ll see a map of the area.”

“What are you humming?” The girl who had been smiling at Adam was on his other side, and she obviously wasn’t listening to Micah either.

“You Are My Sunshine,” Adam answered. “It’s an old song.”

“On the map you’ll see ten targets, five red and five blue,” Micah continued, not noticing the two cadets talking. “You can pretend these are anything you like…supply stations, communication satellite dishes, bunkers. Your mission is to destroy all five of the enemy team’s targets while protecting as many of your own as possible.”

“It sounds cute,” the girl whispered, leaning out of her simulator slightly toward Adam. “Very cheerful.”

“Not really,” Adam said indifferently. He either didn’t notice she was flirting, or he was simply ignoring it. “It’s about a man whose lover left him and found someone else. He loves her so much he’s willing to say the split is all his fault and put it behind them if she’ll just come back to him.”

“Oh. Well, that’s—”

“Sit back and pay attention to your map, please.” Adam sounded perfectly polite when he cut her off, even going so far as to give her a smile as he did. The girl practically beamed and did as he asked with no complaints. So weird.

“No leader will be assigned, your group can either choose one or elect to have none at all,” Micah was saying. “There is no requirement to fly certain formations, no structured flight plan. This is free range, go where you want within the map and do whatever you feel you need to do to win. In this simulation, you’re capable of shooting down your fellow cadets’ planes. If you’re shot down, please step out of the simulator and wait over by the wall. The game ends when all of one team’s targets are destroyed. This is a chance for us to see where you are now, and determine what the class will need to focus on in the future. Take off countdown is beginning now.”

Numbers flashed up on Shiro’s screen, counting down from ten. He took a deep breath, glad the annoying humming had stopped and prepared to taxi down the simulated runway. This was going to be difficult, he didn’t know most of his team and he’d never flown with any of them before. He didn’t know what their skill set was or what they knew about formations.

The countdown hit one, and chaos broke loose.

Nobody seemed to really know what they were doing, it was a free-for-all of cadets shooting at pretty much any other plane that came in their sights thanks to most of them not having enough experience with reading the map or tracking their teammates. Shiro almost took fire from his own team more than once, and it was impossible for him to get near any of the targets simply because he couldn’t trust anyone to cover his back.

“Sim Seven, fall in on Eight’s inner nine. Ten, fall in on her outer, and Nine, fall in on her inner four. Watch out for me when you come in. Everyone stay with Eight, she’s the strongest lead flyer.”

The soft voice didn’t come from the comm, he only heard it because the simulators were open on the sides. He glanced over and found Adam talking to his own team over their communication line, his mouth mostly covered with one hand to avoid the Red Team hearing.

As Shiro watched with irritation, the Blue Team started to line up in formation on his tracking screen while his own team continued to be a mess.

“One, Three, on my nine,” he requested, taking a page out of Adam’s book. Nobody else was stepping up to give orders, so he might as well. The difference was that Shiro knew he was the strongest lead flyer here, and it didn’t matter what the Blue Team did; if he could wrangle the rest of his team, they were done for. “Two, four, on my three.”

“Ignore them,” Adam instructed his team, still speaking quietly. Shiro had to try not to smirk at the fact that Adam didn’t realize he could be heard. “Eight, head for the red target at 2-6. Seven, take it out while the rest of us cover you.”

They were going to make rounds on the map and take out the targets one at a time while the Red Team was busy just trying to get into formation. Or at least they thought they were, Shiro wasn’t going to let that happen. The difference between the teams was that with him in the lead he didn’t have to say his plans out loud, he simply had to lead and the rest of his team would follow. That gave them an advantage.

Shiro followed the other team’s lead, waiting for them to get near their first target and then having his team open fire. The Blue Team broke apart and scattered briefly but Adam pulled them back together and changed their target to 4-1.

That became the pattern. Shiro would let them get close to the target then move in, trying to shoot them out of the sky. The Blue Team would break, inevitably wasting one of the four missiles each simulated plane was equipped with when they were thrown off their aim, and then be pulled together to try again. Shiro didn’t even bother going after the blue targets; at this rate they would exhaust their missiles and become a lot less dangerous, allowing the Red Team to move in and take them out easier.

Adam steered his team to 5-3, then to 7-9. Again and again he tried the same thing, unaware that Shiro could hear him giving orders, not imaginative enough to come up with something new. It eventually got almost boring and he had to check the clock, only to find they were only halfway through the class period.

Adam pointed his team to another target. Shiro yawned, lazily leading his team in that direction. They approached the Blue Team from behind, taking aim.

Shiro’s screen suddenly flashed red in warning as one of the Red Team’s targets was taken out. He sat up straighter, looking around in shock as he tried to figure out how they had managed to hit anything from this distance. He couldn’t figure it out, the Blue Team hadn’t even reached the coordinates yet.

His screen flashed again, indicating another Red Team target was gone. That was when he realized that the bright red X’s coming up on his map were not the target he was circling. He checked his radar scan, and it wasn’t until his screen lit up with a third destroyed target that he understood what was going on.

There were only four members of the Blue Team flying formation. Adam had sent them as bait, and was now halfway across the map taking out his enemy’s targets.

“Damn it,” Shiro muttered, locking on to the nearest enemy plane and firing his lasers before peeling off to chase Adam.

He hit his target. Sim Eight went down, her icon disappearing off the map, the first plane to fall in the exercise. Shiro glanced over at Adam, who had begun to hum again. The other boy must have felt him looking, his own golden gaze flicked over to him. Adam smiled, perfectly handsome and charming, in a way that made Shiro want to punch him in the face.

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop, it’s rude,” Adam offered, turning his eyes back to his screen. “I guess thinking you know what’s going on all the time makes you complacent.”

To emphasize is words, he fired a missile, hitting the fourth Red Team target and leaving them with only one remaining.

Shiro could not believe he had been manipulated by this little brat who he’d never even heard of before today. To say he was angry was an understatement, both at himself and at Adam. But his team was still in play, and he still had a chance to win.

“Shoot them down,” he ordered his team through clenched teeth. “I’ll take care of this one.”

He locked on and fired as he got close enough, but Adam veered upward as he neared a cliff and the missile hit rock before it could correct and follow. Shiro adjusted and went after him, keeping Sim Six in his sights and refusing to be distracted. He could tell by the way Adam was flying that none of the people on his own team were up to par to keep up and he was going to have to do it himself.

In the beginning, Adam tried. He maneuvered very well but Shiro was just better, he could never hit him no matter how many times he came around or how much he fired. And every time Adam tried, Shiro flipped the roles by outmaneuvering him again and coming back up behind him.

On the screen, other planes from both teams were beginning to go down. They were back to ignoring the targets and simply trying to take each other out, little more than a chaotic dog fight. Adam tried to use the melee as cover, daringly flying straight through exchanges of fire, but Shiro was right on his tail and was not letting him get away. He started to lose track of the others, intent on taking down the main threat before Adam could take out his team’s last target.

It was only a few more minutes before all of the other planes were down. It was just the two of them left, and Shiro took that opportunity to stop giving chase and go for the win.

The Blue Team’s targets went down easily with nobody to guard them, at least the first three did. He’d wasted a missile on Adam and had to use his lasers for the fourth target, which took longer since they did less damage. He was heading in for the fifth when Adam’s plane appeared again, making him veer off to avoid being shot down.

Shiro was done. He was not playing with this guy anymore, he was ending this war game right now. He moved his plane back behind Adam’s once again and started herding him in the direction of the final target, firing on him as they approached. Adam now had no choice but to get out of his way and let him finish the job unless he wanted to go down.

The plane in front of him turned upwards into the beginning of a loop, the same move Adam had done a thousand times already that had only let him get behind Shiro for a few brief moments. It hadn’t worked before and it wasn’t going to work now, Shiro was prepared to take out the target and get out of the way.

But Adam surprised him. Instead of doing a full loop he pulled an upward U-turn, firing off a final missile Shiro hadn’t been aware he had. Shiro tensed, waiting for it to hit, but it went clear over him.

He expected Adam’s plane to do so as well. But that wasn’t what happened. At the point where Adam would have passed him, Shiro’s screen flashed an alarming red and then went black. He stared for a moment, trying to comprehend, then whipped around to glare at the other cadet. Adam was already climbing out of the simulator, his screen black as well.

“Did you just crash into me?” Shiro demanded.

“I don’t know, genius, did it look like I crashed into you?” Adam asked calmly.

He held up a hand to silence Shiro, looking up at the screen behind them. Everyone else was looking too, and Shiro angrily turned to see. The planes were down but the game map was still tracking Adam’s live missile.

Which was headed right for the final target for the Red Team.

“…you have got to be kidding me,” Shiro muttered, running his hands through his hair. There was no way. Absolutely no way.

The missile hit its mark, taking out the last Red target. Everyone was too shocked to do anything at first, the room silent. Finally, Micah seemed to collect herself.

“And…the Blue Team wins today,” she said over the mic from the control room, sounding just as surprised as the rest of them. “Okay, cadets, fall into line.”

The Blue Team started cheering, though Shiro wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like any of them had actually done anything, much like his own team had been mostly useless. He finally pulled his eyes away from the screen to glare at Adam.

“You cheated,” Shiro accused.

“That’s not cheating,” he answered. “Shouldn’t you understand the concept of a kamikaze, Shirogane?”

Adam kissed the tips of his fingers, then slapped Shiro hard across the cheek as he passed on his way to fall in with the others.

“Pride cometh before the fall. Nice try, loser.”

Shiro was absolutely livid. He could not believe he’d just been shown up, by someone who was clearly not as good of a pilot no less. It took everything he had not to follow Adam and choke the life out of him right there in the simulator room.

 _I hope he does become a fighter pilot some day_ , Shiro thought darkly. _So I can shoot him out of the air myself._

* * * * * * * * * *

 _ **Current Day**_ :

The planet the Blue Lion landed on wasn’t too far from the Abyss. It was about half the size of earth, rocky with a similar atmosphere. If Shiro had to compare, he’d say it reminded him a lot of Mars. There was very little cover, and what there was consisted of rocky hills.

Shiro set the scanners to keep track of the weather patterns, in case the place was prone to storms. There was no telling how bad winds could get on non-Earth planets, and there was nowhere to hide if they started whipping up here.

Matt and Curtis followed him, both armed and wearing the standard Atlas armor, as he in turn followed a signal he was tracking on his wrist screen.

“I hate to be the one to say it, but I don’t think he’s here,” Matt piped up, shielding his eyes from the sun to look around. “I mean, look, man. You can see for miles, there’s nothing.”

“There has to be something, the signal’s still pretty clear,” Shiro protested, following Matt’s gaze. “Maybe this place has some kind of hidden bunker too?”

“We scanned for life signs,” Curtis pointed out. “There was nothing. Maybe he was here, and he dropped the tracker by accident before he left.”

“No,” Shiro insisted. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, well, fan out,” Curtis suggested, starting to move farther away. “We can cover more ground to look for prints that way.”

Matt obeyed, but only for all of about ten seconds. Then he was back at Shiro’s side, leaning over his shoulder with his eyes glued curiously to the screen as well.

“This is so crazy,” he said for probably about the fifth time in the last half hour. “I can’t believe he’s alive. Like, _alive_. I didn’t think…”

“Yeah,” was all Shiro said, still looking. “I know.”

Matt was a few years younger than them, still just a teenager when he’d headed to Kerberos with Shiro. But he’d been good friends with Adam as well, and he’d mourned the loss when he’d seen Adam’s photo on the memorial wall as well. That was why Shiro had brought Matt and Curtis along, both of them knew Adam, and given Lance’s description of how he was acting Shiro wanted the people who found him to all be friends.

“The signal is coming from right up here,” Shiro said, noting the sudden brightness of the blinking on his screen. He sped up with Matt right on his heels, only slowing once he passed the mark. “It says it’s…here.”

Shiro stopped and looked around, but there really was nothing. They were in the shadow of a rocky hill, which thankfully blocked the worst of the sun, but other than that it was nothing. Just flat ground and rocky soil, and empty.

“Wait,” Matt dropped down, digging his fingers into the ground at their feet. “The dirt’s disturbed. Somebody buried something he—”

He didn’t get to finish. As soon as he touched whatever it was there was a flash, and the next thing Shiro knew he and Matt were in some kind of netted cage. The criss-crossed bars seemed to be made of quintessence, something he most definitely couldn’t break no matter how strong his new arm was.

“Uh,” Matt said intelligently, still on his knees as he looked around at the cage. “This appears to be a predicament.”

Shiro carefully touched the bars, but he didn’t get any feedback from them. Curtis made his way over, his gun at the ready in case the sprung trap drew anybody who was waiting, looking at them with disappointment.

“Really?” He asked. “Both of you?”

“To be fair, we have like two brain cells between us,” Matt offered. “Worse has happened because of it.”

“You don’t know that, because we don’t know how bad this really is,” Curtis pointed out, glancing around again. Shiro did the same, but there didn’t seem to be anybody waiting around to see what the trap caught. “We don’t know who set this, or how they knew how to draw Shiro in, or why it was set.”

“Actually, I think we do know who,” Matt protested, brushing away some more of the dirt. A bright glow was coming from beneath it, as he revealed the Infinite Zero core. “This thing just shocked me, I’m not touching it again.”

“Romelle did say Adam had it,” Shiro frowned, crouching down as well. He carefully tapped the crystal with a finger, but it didn’t shock him in any way. What it did do, as he picked it up, was seem to almost melt and slip into the crystal on his hand, disappearing the same way Shiro’s new bayard weapon had done earlier as if tucking itself away.

“What else can you hide in there?” Matt asked after a moment.

“Not your porn,” Shiro answered, reaching down again for something silvery that was down in the dirt as well. “You’re just going to have to do without while you’re on the Atlas.”

He held up the dog tags, blowing the dust away and taking a closer look. One was his and the other was Adam’s, there was absolutely no question now of who had set the trap. The question was just why, and what was going to happen next.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GRAPHIC VIOLENCE WARNING: I try to be vague in my descriptions but this chapter does include a graphic fight. Blood, extreme violence. Incident will be marked between "VW" and "/VW" within the text.

_**Eight hours earlier, real time**_ :

Lotor had been at the facility in the Quantum Abyss for twenty-eight hours out of the thirty-two he’d planned, and he was ready to scream. Between Adam and Kuro he felt like he was married with a severely hyperactive child, and he was beginning to wonder far less why his father had eventually gone mad.

It was blessedly quiet in the lab where he was working, which should have pleased him since he was busy, but the peace only distracted him. Given how the last twenty hours had been, any time it was quiet was a cause for great concern.

Adam was a terrible patient, in that he’d literally rather die than be a patient at all. Lotor understood this to an extent, the man had been repeatedly run through a cycle of pit fighting and lab testing for a long time and he was traumatized no matter how much he didn’t want to admit it. But Lotor’s patience had its limits.

Kuro understood a little better, having been through similar torments himself, and he was far more laid back than Lotor was in general. This mix made him almost overly indulgent, Kuro saw no problem whatsoever with anything Adam took it upon himself to do. Which was a nightmare, because Adam was a highly skilled engineer who was completely incapable of sitting still even as he was dying.

Lotor was carefully distributing the fruits of his labor into sealable vials when he heard the lab door open, and Kuro’s familiar, light step crossing the room on his way to one of the examination tables.

“Where is he?” Lotor asked without looking up. He knew he did not need to specify who he was talking about.

“Beats me, I haven’t seen him since I shot him full of corisoltamine eight hours ago,” Kuro answered, dropping something heavily on the table. Lotor looked up to find him laying out what looked like the carcass of a mauled Abyss creature.

“That…is an animal tranquilizer.”

“Aren’t we all just different species of animals?” Kuro asked, pulling on gloves. “I left him face down out in the hall. Since he’s not there anymore I assume he woke up at some point and is not in fact dead from an overdose.”

As cavalier as Kuro tended to speak, Lotor trusted his skills. Some of the things he did were a bit unconventional—and extremely questionable as far as ethics—but that was what came from learning a skill outside of approved training facilities. He had already begun translating the insulin synthesis process into one that would fit his needs and was running Adam’s genetic fingerprint in the full confidence that he could eventually reverse what Haggar had done. If he thought it was fine to use a high-powered animal tranquilizer on an extremely childish human, then Lotor wasn’t going to question it.

Kuro pulled on a lab coat and turned on the light over the table. He fetched a tray of tools from where he had them stored on a counter and turned on a small recorder, clipping it to the collar of his coat.

“Autopsy number 6-8-4: subject is reptilian with a body length of about four feet. Tail is missing so it’s difficult to establish length, but estimating it at three to four feet,” he murmured, picking up one of the tools and leaning over his little project. “Cause of death appears to be a broken neck incurred from an attack by a large predator. Given visible teeth marks, the attacking animal’s jaw is elongated. It’s bite measures eleven inches front to back and seven inches across. Teeth are very sharp, probably a true carnivore. In the absence of size and shape similarity to previously found carcasses I’m assuming this predator is an as-of-yet unseen species.”

Kuro’s voice was eerily similar to Shiro’s, but colored just enough by his environment to make it easily discernible. He had a calm way of speaking, very smooth and soothing, it was almost easy to forget he was apparently noting the existence of something very large and very dangerous prowling around near the facility.

Kuro set his measuring tool aside and cracked his knuckles, then dug into the carcass’ torn open abdominal cavity with far more enthusiasm than anyone had any right to possess over something dead. Lotor decided he wasn’t so interested in watching this after all.

He was capping his vials and stowing them in a small case when the door opened again, this time to admit Adam.

In spite of ongoing treatment, Adam was steadily getting worse. They had taken to using smaller packs of the nutrient solution strapped to his upper arm, a sort of mobile IV, so he would be able to get up and move around and not go stir crazy. He was still confined to the labs and the hangar because he was simply too dangerous to allow near Bandor, Maya and Keela, but at least he wasn’t strapped to a gurney.

But although the workaround was allowing his body to absorb nutrition again there was still a lot of damage that had been done, and until they had a source of luferin he was going to continue to degrade.

“Good morning, Sunshine,” Kuro greeted. He pulled something out of the reptile’s stomach area with a loud ‘shlorp’ sound that made Lotor want to gag. Adam, on the other hand, approached the table and leaned over to look at what he was doing so closely Kuro had to gently push him back with a non-bloodied pinky. “Sleep well?”

“Like a smartass snuck up on me and stabbed me in the back with a needle.”

Adam pushed away from the table, wandering over to the one where Lotor was working. He picked up an uncapped vial and held it up, shaking the mixture inside until Lotor reached over and plucked it out of his fingers.

“That’s your addiction treatment?” Adam asked, leaning against the table. “How does it work?”

“Injection into the bloodstream once a day,” Lotor answered, surreptitiously pushing the tray of vials out of Adam’s reach. “Gifted Alteans carry a different DNA strand that builds receptors in the brain that produce emotional reactions when manipulating quintessence. This blocks those receptors.”

“So you can still use it, but you don’t get anything out of it?” Adam guessed.

“On its own, yes,” Lotor replied. He capped the vial of pale green liquid and put it into the case, taking out a different vial that had a dose of something light purple. “This stops the ability to manipulate quintessence completely. If I mix it in with the first few doses of the blocker I can stop myself from being able to access or absorb it at all. Consider it a forced system cleanse.”

“How long does that work for?” Adam reached for this vial out of curiosity, but Lotor pulled it out of his reach and replaced it in the case.

“It kicks in within a few minutes and lasts for a few hours. But it has a very limited range of use.”

“Limited how?”

“My quintessence use mirrors Haggar,” Lotor answered bitterly. “I share her blood and whatever strange curse comes with it, I suppose you would consider much of what little I’m able to do to be dark magic. This will work on me, but not on other Alteans.”

“Oh.” Lotor could tell Adam was already losing interest. It wasn’t anything he had a use for, and already his gaze was drifting back to what Kuro was doing. “Well, it can’t be used against us, then. Can you unlock the glass cabinet in the lab next door? There’s something I want out of it.”

“Depends on what you want out of it,” Lotor answered, continuing to fill the rest of his vials.

“The really big knife.”

“No.”

Adam heaved an annoyed sigh, pushing away from the table and going over to the shelving unit that held the tech prototypes. He picked through them boredly for a few minutes, then held up a surgical laser.

“Can I take this?”

“What for?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“Then no you may not.”

Adam put it back, growing more irritated. Lotor could hear it in the way he was starting to slam things around.

“Can I have this screwdriver?”

“No,” Lotor said immediately. “You can have nothing that can be used as a weapon if you get in a mood.”

“Fine,” Adam irately threw the screwdriver down and picked up something else. “Here’s a glowy rock, am I at least allowed to have a glowy rock?”

“Take the glowy rock,” Lotor snapped, getting exasperated. He was trying to work and he did not feel like babysitting. “And then go somewhere else with it, I have things to do.”

“Wow, moody,” Adam muttered, heading for the door.

He was through it and the room was quiet for about the span of three heartbeats before Lotor realized he’d just been played like an instrument. He carefully put down his vial and sprinted to the door, throwing it open and looking back and forth up and down the hall. He spotted Adam heading for the other lab.

“No!” Lotor said loudly, snapping his fingers to call Adam’s attention. He held out his hand. “Absolutely not. Give it to me.”

“Damn it,” Adam hissed, turning around and trudging back like an incensed teenager. He slapped the faintly glowing blue ore into Lotor’s waiting hand.

“What’d he take?” Kuro asked from inside the room.

“Seuronite,” Lotor answered, yanking it out of Adam’s reach. “Which means he’s building a bomb.”

“Oh. What for?”

“It doesn’t matter what for,” Lotor tried to keep his voice even, looking back at Kuro as he gestured futily at Adam. “He’s not allowed to build a bomb.”

“Why? If it’s not us he’s blowing up with it then let him build the bomb. It’ll keep him busy for a few hours.”

Lotor closed his eyes and counted slowly down from three. It had to be the human in them that made them so stupidly reckless, there was no other explanation. Human genes were what they both had in common, there was no way two different, supposedly intelligent species would think letting a barely-medicated and possibly bi-polar Nixa build explosives in an enclosed space was an okay idea.

“He’s leaving soon,” Adam said thankfully to Kuro, crossing his arms. “I’ll finish it after he’s gone.”

That statement sent chills down Lotor’s spine. It was a given that he was going to have to return to the colony without Adam, that he would have to leave the other man in Kuro’s care. But it had not occurred to him that Kuro would probably let him do whatever he wanted once Lotor and the other three Alteans weren’t around to tell them no.

“Kuro,” Lotor rubbed his temple as he crossed the lab to go back to his table, dropping the seuronite into a drawer there and locking it. “Double up Adam’s drip, please. Get him stable, he’s going into cryo sleep when I leave. Bandor, Maya, and Keela will be staying to keep an eye on you until the luferin is done, then they’ll accompany you both to meet me.”

“Sure,” Kuro said agreeably, followed by a wet snapping sound as he started cutting away the carcass’ rib cage to get a better look at the chest anatomy. “Nice guy, Bandor.”

“You’re not locking me in a tube,” Adam protested, coming back into the lab. “That is not happening.”

“You don’t have a choice,” Lotor said firmly, finishing up and closing his medical case. “Once you’re more stable it will keep you that way for the next five days or so, until the luferin is ready. It will also keep you out from underfoot and let Kuro get the treatment ready without you constantly bothering him about things you shouldn’t be doing anyway.”

“Hey, can we remember that I’m a grown adult and I don’t need you barking orders at me?” Adam said snappishly. “You’re not my parent and you’re not my boss, I’m the one who decides what happens to me. Do you understand? Not Honerva, not you. _Me_.”

He started to turn away but stumbled slightly, wavering on his feet as a change in his blood pressure undoubtedly affected him badly in his current condition. Lotor and Kuro both saw it and dropped what they were doing, Kuro reaching him first and catching him just before he hit the floor. Adam was already unconscious when Lotor reached them, not for the first time in the last day.

It only lasted a few moments, then his eyes fluttered open and he winced. As much as Adam refused to admit it his body was fragile, Lotor could see it in the way he often moved, and falls like this did him no favors.

Kuro helped him across the lab to sit on his abandoned gurney while Lotor got him some water.

“You need to stop behaving as if you’re healthy,” Lotor warned. “You aren’t. Even simple things, you can’t do them anymore. I’m leaving in two hours, and you will go into cryo sleep when I do.”

Adam glared at him, but he didn’t have the strength at the moment to fight. Kuro gave him a push to make him lie down and Adam couldn’t even muster enough energy to not fall back onto the gurney, he was just about at the end of his road.

“I’m going to go down to the synthesis lab,” Kuro decided, pulling off his bloodied gloves and hooking the regular IV up to Adam’s other arm. “We’re losing him, I need to figure out a way to process this faster. Maybe the Alteans can help somehow.”

“Yes, do that,” Lotor sighed, running a hand tiredly through his hair. “I’ll let him sit with the IV for a bit and then put him in a pod before I leave. I’ll be taking the striker and leaving the shuttle for you all, as soon as you think he’s okay to travel come meet me.”

“See you in six days,” Kuro gave a faint salute, letting himself out. “Well, a day and a half once you’re out there.”

Lotor looked over at Adam, who had now dozed off on the gurney. He let out a breath and left the lab as well, going down a few doors to the room where the healing pods were waiting for use. He stopped at the first one, changing the settings to cryo sleep and setting the timer for eight days just to be sure. If Kuro was successful sooner, he’d come wake Adam up sooner.

When he returned he set about packing everything he needed up to leave, glancing over absently at the corner of the room as he piled the three small cases of vials on the corner of one of the tables. He looked back down at what he was doing before he did a double take, looking back over when he realized the gurney was empty.

Lotor did not get a chance to do anything else before he felt a sharp pain between his shoulder blades. A tingling feeling ran along his spine then down his arms and legs, which suddenly were no longer strong enough to hold him. He felt himself falling, something he could do nothing about because of how incredibly sleepy he suddenly was.

Arms caught him. He found himself lifted into a military-style carry as Adam moved him over to the gurney, laying him out on his side.

“Don’t worry, I only gave you a little bit,” Adam assured him, setting the half-full syringe of blue liquid down on the table. Lotor realized Kuro had left the corisoltamine accessible. “Not enough to knock you out for hours, anyway. And I’m gonna warn you, this stuff makes your tongue feel numb.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Lotor asked, his mouth indeed feeling like he didn’t have fully control over it. “Are you insane?”

“Depends on which psychologist you ask. But yeah, probably.”

Adam’s entire demeanor was changed. The weakness was gone, the helplessness had disappeared. He moved with full control and seemed a vastly different person, all of the petulance and immaturity replaced by a somber serenity. He was definitely sick and dying, that much was a fact attested to by medical scans, but he was just as alert and active now as he had been in all of the time Lotor had seen him on the Lorelia.

It had been an act. Adam had been conning them the whole time, probably from the moment he had agreed to give Lotor a blood sample to get out of the cage. He had figured out exactly how to manipulate them both to get the reactions he wanted without ever needing to hypnotize, playing on Lotor’s nerves with the irritating child act and Kuro’s compassion by feigning weakness.

Adam disappeared briefly from the lab, returning a few minutes later with his flight suit back on. He checked his pockets to make sure he had all of his things then started going through the lab and putting things in a bag.

“No offense, just so you know,” Adam said, picking up the cage disc and looking at it thoughtfully. He dropped it in the bag. “I really do appreciate that you want to help, and under better circumstances I’d let you. But I’ve been planning a big hunting trip since before you woke up, and I really I can’t cancel.”

Lotor watched Adam go through the whole lab, choosing the things he would take with careful consideration. He was in no hurry and they both knew he didn’t need to be; Kuro was not coming back up here anytime soon and he didn’t have to worry about being caught. Lotor had to hand it to him, Adam definitely wasn’t stupid. He handled everything he picked up with care and respect, studying it until he was certain there was no way for it to backfire on him. Twice he considered items Lotor hoped he would take, ones that his lack of Altean genes would set off and incapacitate him if he tried to use them.

He left both of those. When he was done here he left the room and Lotor took that opportunity to try to get up, but all he managed to do was slide off the gurney and down to his knees. He balanced in a crouch, just barely keeping himself from falling to the floor, listening as the sound of glass breaking filtered in through the open door. Adam returned with the knife he’d mentioned earlier and Lotor stiffened, waiting for him to use it, but he only used some of Kuro’s gauze to wrap the blade and then dropped it in the bag with everything else.

“It kicks your ass, doesn’t it?” Adam asked, noticing Lotor had tried to move. “Imagine a whole dose. I still feel like I got run over by a horse. You probably don’t even know what a horse is.”

It was getting very hard to think. Lotor tried to give an acerbic retort but his mouth didn’t want to work any more than his legs did. He couldn’t fight the sedative forever, not even at a small dose, and he was beginning to lose the battle. Adam finished with what he was doing and came over to crouch in front of him, using a finger to lift his chin and look at him.

“I don’t have a lot of advice for someone who’s lived ten thousand years,” Adam admitted. “But I do have this: stop calling her Haggar. Honerva isn’t dead, Honerva is alive and well. Honerva made the active decision to play with what she didn’t understand, and Honerva chose to go down the path she’s on.”

He held up one of the vials taken from the medical case so Lotor could see it.

“You did this, you decided to take a different road. She could have done the same thing, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t care enough about you before you were born to put a stop to what she was doing, she wasn’t a saint. Every time you call her Haggar, you separate the real woman from a fantasy ideal you built up in your head.

“Sometimes parents are just fucked up, Lotor. The woman you’ve been fighting against is your mother, period, and she absolutely does not give a shit about you. Accept it and fight her on those terms, because if she finds out you still believe there was anything good about ‘Honerva’ she will use that against you.”

He got up and Lotor felt him grab his arm, and the next thing he knew he was being lifted again. The Earth military apparently didn’t fool around with training their soldiers, Adam was slightly winded when they reached the pod room because of being sick but he had little trouble propping his charge up in the pod. Lotor watched helplessly, trying to stay awake, as the glass closed over him and cut him off from the outside world.

“Don’t worry, somebody will be here to get you eventually,” Adam assured him, muffled through the shell of the pod. “It might take a couple days with the time difference, though.”

He activated the timer that had already been set and waiting, and Lotor felt a familiar cooling sensation running over his skin. There was no way to fight that, no way to hit any of the emergency stop controls from the inside while he was already sedated. There was nothing Lotor could do except watch everything fade into blackness.

* * * * * * * * * *

Adam returned to the empty lab down the hall, a room he’d been using as his little home base for the time that he had been here. Neither Lotor nor Kuro had bothered to come down here since it wasn’t being used, and had left him to his own devices because it meant peace and quiet for them.

Adam had never been the fastest, or the strongest, and even with his height he’d never been the biggest. He had to get ahead by being the smartest, by thinking ten steps ahead when others only went five. He had to figure out everyone’s biggest personality flaw shortly after meeting them and immediately adjust his behavior to start laying groundwork in case it had to be used against them in the future.

He had learned this early on, in the fancy halls of elite Catholic boarding schools, where every smile was fake and every student came from extreme wealth they were being raised to defend at any cost. It wasn’t a way he liked to be, he didn’t particularly enjoy having a different face for every person he met, but often it was the only way to get where he wanted to go.

He opened a drawer on an unused table and began pulling out the treasures he’d hoarded over the last twenty-eight hours since arrival. Star maps, sketches of the controls on both the shuttle and striker in the hangar, various stolen tools and parts. He packed everything away and then went back to Kuro’s lab to grab the mostly full nutrition mix IV, then headed for the hangar.

It had been getting down to the wire there, when Lotor had finally decided to use the cryo pod. Adam had known he could get Kuro to scurry off to his lab, he had the same need to attack challenges head on that Takashi had. Lotor had been a little trickier, he was more alert and less trusting. It had taken a very steady, very high level of annoyance to get him to the point of deciding to use the pod, something that was necessary since Adam couldn’t work it himself. And it had been no small feat to paint Kuro as being irresponsible enough to need babysitting, either.

It would have been much more difficult to knock out and stow everyone in pods. That only Lotor was expected to be gone and the four others were oblivious was far more convenient.

Adam took his time in the hangar, loading his things into the striker and biding his time until the point when Lotor would have been leaving. Nobody bothered him when he finally opened the hangar bay and taxied out of the facility, nothing was amiss as he headed for the edge of the Quantum Abyss. He used the pre-programmed flight path that Kuro already had set up in the striker, sitting back for the ride in tense apprehension.

Flying through this place alone was a risk since he was inexperienced with it. Even with a programmed flight path, if something went wrong he was screwed. Lotor and Kuro and even Bandor knew the way, Adam did not.

He had to close his eyes, breathe deeply, and try to remain calm as the striker began to feel the first bursts of light from the nearby star.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**A few years ago:** _

Adam was hanging upside down from the main power system of the partially-built MFE fighter model, digging around in the mess of components for the dynotherm connector. Something wasn’t lining up right and power wasn’t reaching the megathrusters, undoubtedly a consequence of mixing Earth technology with alien.

“Should’ve gone with the Galra ship design,” he muttered, stretching a little further to try and reach the coupler to test its seal. “At least you can find what you’re looking for in there.”

Adam preferred the Galra striker he’d studied over the Altean pod style, it was built for real war while the Altean design was split evenly between efficiency and looks. It was fast, it was overpowered, and it was brutal, design elements the Garrison would have done well to incorporate into its planes. But Sanda wanted fighter jets that still looked like fighter jets, like the shape of a vessel’s wing was somehow a planetary trademark, and she didn’t seem to care that they were sacrificing power for speed. That was the problem with having somebody who wasn't a pilot in charge of what new planes got built.

“What do I know, though?” Adam asked, gritting his teeth as he reached in with both hands now, gripping the coupler with pliers and trying to get it loose while still hanging upside down. “I’ve only been studying space engineering since I was twelve, how could I possibly have an informed opinion? …look, you stupid son of a bitch, if you don’t disconnect I’m going to set you on fire.”

The coupler jerked forward suddenly as it loosened, making Adam lose his grip on the pliers. They fell down to the floor below, barely missing his face on their way.

“God, really?” Adam groaned plaintively, wrapping one leg more firmly around its support and carefully letting go with his hands to hang down and try to retrieve it. “Come on, I don’t need this right now.”

He stretched as much as he could get his torso to, his wiggling fingers just barely brushing the side of the pliers. He was so close, if he just had another quarter of an inch on his reach he would have them. Carefully, he loosened the grip of his leg to let himself go just a little bit lower.

He immediately lost his hold and fell, letting out a surprised yelp as he curled to avoid slamming his head on the concrete. As he fell his foot caught the tray of tools and parts he had hanging on the underside of the power system, showering him with nuts, bolts, and small tools. Adam covered his head with his arms and waited for the metallic rain to stop, pushing himself up into a sitting position to glare up at his work.

“K.I.T.T. would never treat me this way!” He yelled at it. “Stupid SkyNet piece of shit.”

The dynotherm coupler came loose and fell, bouncing off of his head.

Adam let out an unholy shriek of frustration and fell back onto the floor, stretching a leg up to kick the ladder he’d been using before laying flat and staring up at the mess of wires and tubes and pipes. This wasn’t working, these parts weren’t fitting together the way they should. They were going to have to go back to the plans, do more calculations and reconfigure the systems to fit better into human-made fighter jets. This wasn’t even the real thing, it was just the quarter scale model, if this didn’t work there was no way a full sized power system built on these schematics would.

It was only now that he lay quiet that Adam noticed he wasn’t alone. He turned his head to look over at the man standing in the doorway and immediately got to his feet, turning away and going back over to the computer at the testing table.

“What do you want?” Adam asked bluntly. “I have four more hours before I need to send a report up to you.”

“I’m not here about the ships,” Sam Holt came further into the room, wisely keeping his distance. He wasn’t welcome in this lab when Adam was on shift and he knew it. “I have something I need to give you.”

“A headache?” Adam asked. “On top of the distinct pain that comes up in the ass area whenever you’re around, of course.”

“Look, Adam, I know you blame me for Kerberos—“

“No, “blaming” implies that you’re not completely at fault,” Adam answered, magnifying the section of the schematic that showed the dynotherm connections. “But I’m not having this conversation with you. If I feel like bitching about Kerberos I’ll make a martini and call my therapist.”

“It was a perfectly routine research trip,” Sam began. “There was no way for anybody to know—“

“How are your kids, Sam?” Adam asked, cutting him off.

The silence that followed was deafening. Adam wasn’t supposed to know that Katie Holt was missing and that Matthew Holt was out fighting for his life at the edges of the galaxy, but having a high ranking Communications officer as a friend was one of the few perks Adam had.

“That’s not fair,” Sam murmured.

“It wasn’t fair when you took Takashi away from me either,” Adam answered, throwing a fresh supply of nuts and bolts onto a new tray. “Welcome to my hell, Sammy Dearest.”

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for him,” Sam defended. Adam rounded on him before he could launch into any further defense.

“No, it was exactly what you just said it was,” he seethed, tossing the tray back on the table. “It was a routine research mission. That’s all it was, there was nothing special about it. You talked it up and got it into his head that it was some kind of glamorous “big step for mankind” moment, and for what? Ice cores? Our probes could have brought those fucking things back, it didn’t need a manned mission.”

He stepped forward, easily towering over Sam, picking up a wrench and using it to poke him in the chest as he slowly drove him backwards.

“You might think that ground level soldiers are stupid, that we can’t comprehend the work of “great men,” but I understand perfectly well what Kerberos was about. You spent ten years designing and building a new shuttle model and the Garrison poured too much money into it to test it quietly. The only reason you and Sanda butted heads over it at all was because she never expected you to poach her star pilot for a publicity stunt.”

He stopped herding Sam back and turned away, throwing the wrench in the general direction of the work table and walking away.

“Youngest pilot to ever lead a space mission, that sounds so good in a story about a newly made space shuttle. Did you even care that he was sick?” Adam asked, not looking at the man who was technically his boss at the moment as he finished reloading his parts tray. “How does it feel to know you burned up what would have been the last months of his life just so he could be known to the whole world as the inept pilot who crashed the Kerberos shuttle?”

“I thought you weren’t going to have this conversation with me?” Sam asked.

“I’m keeping myself from beating your skull in out of respect for “Pidge Gunderson,” Adam shot back. “I’m not in the habit of letting my students come home to find out I murdered their parents. Yet. Do what you’ve got to do and get out.”

Sam sighed and stepped forward, pulling a small thumb drive out of his pocket. He held it out for Adam to take.

“Shiro sent this for you,” he said. “He put it on a different drive from the kids…I had to hide it in a compartment on the pod and I was only able to get it out without being seen today. I didn’t think you’d appreciate Sanda having a transcript of whatever he had to say to you.”

Adam stopped what he was doing and looked at Sam.

“I don’t want it.”

“Adam, come on,” Sam was losing patience. “You’re a grown man, act like it for once.”

In response, Adam ripped the drive out of Sam’s hand without breaking eye contact and threw it across the lab, where it skidded under a low pallet holding parts.

“Message delivered. Good bye.”

“Are you really going to keep being a—”

“ _Good bye._ ”

“Fine,” Sam threw up his hands and surrendered, giving up on the fight.

It was a bitter encounter for both of them, given how close both Adam and Shiro had been with Matt Holt. Sam had been Adam’s go-to during his college years, a man he had looked up to and strived to do justice to the work of. He had once been one of Adam’s heroes, now just being in the same room with him was its own kind of torture.

Sam left, and Adam went back to his work. He tried again to get the coupler to fit properly, giving it a good few minutes before he was forced to give in and admit that he was too distracted.

He left everything hanging where it was and went to the pallet, getting down on hands and knees to fish the small drive out from under it. Tucking it safely away in the pocket of the engineering uniform he wore he left the lab, locking it down with his code and taking the short walk across the quad to the faculty offices.

Adam left the lights off when he went into his office, locking the door and throwing himself into the chair behind his desk. He spun in it slowly, turning the flash drive over in his fingers, examining the little metal rectangle like it held the secrets of the universe. He was reluctant to look at it, uncertain of what he might find on it and unprepared to handle any more bad news.

“If I’m lucky, he’s just asking me to water his plants,” Adam muttered, giving in and opening his laptop to plug the drive in.

He pulled his knees up, curling up in the chair like a little kid as he started the recorded message. The view was shaky as the recorder was settled at first, a skewed image of a man’s chest in an unfamiliar black vest.

_“I think you turned it on.”_

_“Nah, it’s still off.”_

_“Lance, the light is green.”_

_“Oh, I guess it is on. Sorry.”_

The image evened out, showing an empty chair. Adam knew both voices and it was jarring, hearing them both in the context of this strange place on video. Takashi sat down in the chair, looking distinctively uncomfortable at being on camera.

 _“Okay, you should be good now,”_ Lance’s voice said off to the side. _“Who’s your message for?”_

 _“Just…somebody,”_ Takashi said awkwardly.

 _“Yeah? Got a little sweetheart at home?”_ Lance asked suggestively. Adam couldn’t help the little smile he felt tugging at his mouth, knowing the boy was talking about him but that Takashi probably had no idea. Lance’s head popped into view, obscuring Takashi briefly, breaking into a wide smile. _“Hi!”_

 _“Thank you for your help, Lance. Feel free to go,”_ Takashi groaned, pushing him out of the frame. There was a pause while he watched to the side, only relaxing after the sound of a door swishing closed heralded that he was alone.

Adam looked at the man sitting in front of the camera and wanted to cry. That stupid tuft of hair he always made fun of but secretly thought was adorable had gone white, and a lot of the hair Takashi kept cut very short was beginning to lighten from stress as well. His arm, the one he’d had the worst nerve twitches in, was gone. Just gone. They had taken apart his body and wired him up to a machine.

The worst part, though, were his eyes when he looked at the camera. They had once been so bright and full of life, now they were dull and hollow and held the faint traces of dark circles that came after too long of just barely not getting enough sleep. He had bulked up a bit, muscle-wise, but he looked so defeated and tired.

What had they done to his poor baby?

 _“Hi, Adam,”_ Takashi said awkwardly, absently rubbing the back of his neck. _“I’m…not really sure how to start this. I wish I was saying it to your face, but I just don’t know when I’ll have a chance. This recording may be my only chance to talk to you for a while, and I don’t want to wait._

_“Um, for starters, I have some Garrison students with me. Lance McClain, Hunk Garrett, and Katie Holt. She was in classes under the name Pidge Gunderson, but since she looks just like Matt I’m pretty sure you already knew who she was while you were teaching her. Thanks for not outing her.”_

“What was I supposed to do, Takashi?” Adam snorted. “Get her kicked off the property again? She wanted to clear her family’s name, I understood the feeling.”

 _“Keith is here too. Apparently he got bad enough to get kicked out after I was gone, but you probably knew that already too.”_ Takashi fell quiet for a moment, looking down at his hands. They balled lightly into fists, and he kept his gaze on the table.

_“I’m sorry. For a lot of things. When I was getting ready to leave for Kerberos, all that mattered was getting into that shuttle and making history. But once I was in there and we were on the way, history started to look just like every other expedition. Empty space, lots of stars in the distance, nothing to look at but a bunch of flashing instruments. I thought about home a lot, about the apartment. The more I thought about what I gave up, the less being the one to make history felt worth it.”_

He looked up at the camera, almost wistfully.

_“The closer we got to the edge of the solar system, the more I wanted to be back on Earth. I wanted to be waking up every morning annoyed that we never got around to buying light-blocking curtains for the bedroom, or be doing the monthly bills and trying to figure out how the hell you managed to spend so much money on a belt. I got to see a comet without the atmosphere in the way, and all I could think was that I would rather be laying on the sofa with you, watching TV._

_“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took you for granted, I’m sorry I just assumed you’d always be there. I’m sorry I was always too busy chasing the next big mission to support you like I should have. I saw you after that accident, I knew we could have lost you, but I still refused to understand why you couldn’t just get over it and start taking risks again. And I’m sorry I was never interested in your work, because you know what?_

_“I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. I’m here with these four amazing kids and a teenage princess, and I think I finally understand what you got out of being a teacher. I got to watch them go from awkward cadets to this well-disciplined machine, and I’m just so stupidly proud of them I can’t even put it into words. Sometimes they come to me looking for answers and I remember that I’m an adult, and I have to pretend I have my shit together and try my best to help them out. And every time they go out on a mission I hold my breath, because I just want them all to stay locked up here in the Castle where I can keep them safe._

_“There’s nothing boring about it. There’s nothing mundane about it. I’m handling five of them while you…you went in every day and you handled twenty to thirty kids at a time. You did it without breaking a sweat, then you went to your drills and your physical training and you kept up your active duty. And even after that, you came home and took care of me, and listened to me go on and on about dumb shit like the new helmet decal I bought and never laughed in my face for being a light weight._

_“So, I’m sorry. Someday I’ll be able to say it to your face like you deserve, but I really need you to hear it before then. I’m sorry for everything. I know that everything I did led to us being here and that it was important, that we showed up in time to do a lot of good that needed to be done. So I can’t regret any of it or wish it didn’t happen, because too many lives were saved by it. But I’m still sorry for it.”_

Takashi took a deep breath, taking a moment to collect himself. It was a lot for him, Adam knew, neither of them were the apology types. Saying sorry wasn’t easy for them, ever, so he knew Takashi had to really mean it for it to come out of his mouth.

 _“I’m not sick anymore,”_ he said after a moment, rubbing his strange prosthetic arm. _“That was the one good thing they did for me, they got rid of the Huntington’s. The arm…I don’t know about the arm, I woke up with this. Maybe it couldn’t be saved. Maybe they wanted a tissue sample and took it. I don’t know. What I know is that I’m not sick anymore. I’m not sick and I’m free, and I have my whole life ahead of me for the first time in years.”_

He hesitated for a minute, then made himself look at the camera.

 _“I don’t know if you moved on and you’re seeing someone else,”_ he said carefully. _“And I wouldn’t be upset at all if you did. But if you haven’t, if you’re still available…I have no right to ask you for anything, but I would be so grateful if you’d give me another chance. If you’d wait for me, just a little bit longer.”_

Takashi’s voice hitched a little, and even though he was fighting it his eyes started to tear up.

_“I…want to go home. I spent so much time wanting to go to the stars, and now that I’m here I just want to go home. I want to finish this war and bring these kids back safe and buy a house and be home. And you’re a big part of home.”_

He stopped and leaned forward, burying his face in his hands. Adam didn’t even bother putting up a similar fight, he let the tears go unchecked since there was nobody around to see them. After a long pause Takashi slid down to rest his head on his arms, looking at the camera with slightly damp eyes.

 _“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray,”_ he sang softly. _“You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”_

Adam closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward against his knees. Takashi was no Johnny Cash, in fact he was a horrible singer. He was slightly off key and his timing was bad, but Adam smiled softly anyway.

_“In all my dreams, dear, you seem to leave me, when I wake my poor heart pains, so if you come back and make me happy, I’ll forgive you, I’ll take all the blame. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray, you’ll never know, dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.”_

Takashi fell silent, and Adam opened his eyes. The other pilot still had his head resting on his arms, and was watching as he absently drew shapes on the table with one finger. After a brief pause his eyes flicked up to the camera.

 _“I miss you,”_ he whispered.

Takashi reached up and stopped the recording, and the screen went black. Adam opened his desk drawer and pulled out the box of tissues there, trying to dry his face and knowing he probably looked a mess. There was no way he’d be able to leave his office until his eyes weren’t red, which would only happen if he could just manage to stop fucking crying.

“I miss you too,” he murmured to the blank screen. “Please come home soon.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Two hours earlier, real time:** _

Adam put a final ‘x’ on the star chart laid out on the floor of the striker and sat back on his heels to look at his work. Every jump the Lorelia had made was now marked, and the correlating coordinates he’d given to Honerva written in. He had just finished calculations for where the Abyss facility and colony were, and the final coordinates he was going to pass on were written down and ready to go.

It was almost time to go meet Honerva. He’d hailed her once he was out of the Abyss and had been given instructions on where to go, now he just had to wait for the specified time. That was just a couple hours away.

Just a few more hours and this would be over.

Adam appreciated what Lotor and Kuro were trying to do, but the fact was that he couldn’t live like this. He couldn’t go back to Earth, he couldn’t live among normal human beings knowing he was just one or two missed shots away from being no better than a mindless animal. Or worse, an intelligent animal.

Stretching, Adam pushed the star chart away and reached over to the tracker that was sitting on the nearby seat, turning it on. He didn’t know if Keith had picked up Lance’s signal and gone to find him, or if he had brought the Atlas and Takashi with him. He just knew he had to be ready. He had Kuro and Lotor settled in one place and knew they wouldn’t be moving from there for some time, now he had to tie down Takashi if he was near.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t exactly trust Takashi to follow a signal through the Abyss to end up in the same place as the others in one piece, so he was going to have to get him to sit still somewhere else.

He spent a little bit of time going over the things he’d brought. He used the gauze wrapping the knife blade to tie it to his calf under his flight suit as a makeshift sheathe, then filled a syringe in case he needed it. He activated the quintessence cage next, already knowing the code to turn it off by having watched Kuro do so when he’d been let out. He spent about an hour fiddling with it, trying to get it to suit his needs.

He was just finishing up, pleased with his success, when his radio crackled.

_“This is the Captain of the IGF Atlas, hailing the Lorelia shuttle. Please be advised that there is a Galra armada over Colony One. I repeat, do not approach Colony One. Please make contact with me via frequency channel 81.423, or with the Atlas via frequency channel 42.874.”_

“This is the Captain of the IGF Atlas,” Adam repeated mockingly to himself as he shut the cage down. “I can’t boil water but I can run a ship, hurr hurr hurr. They put me in charge of hundreds of people who don’t know I can’t figure out how fabric softener works.”

He got up and tossed the cage disk into his bag, flopping down in the pilot seat and replaying the hail. Takashi and the Atlas were open on two different hailing frequencies, which meant they were in two different places.

Which meant he had probably gotten—and was following—the signal.

Adam ran a feedback scan on the hail frequency, running the program to track its location. While the striker did its work he carefully removed the IV needle from his hand and stowed the nearly empty IV bag, running a separate scan of nearby planets. Most of them were no good, he needed one that was pretty much lifeless and empty. The kind of planet where nobody would come looking at random for a missing Captain.

“Full armada over the colony,” he mused, talking to himself. It was too quiet in the striker, he hadn’t been completely alone in a year and a half and the silence bothered him. “That’s magical. Talk about convenience, they’re right in the neighborhood.”

His feedback scan came back with the location of Takashi’s broadcast. He was currently stopped but he wasn’t very far, only a system or two over.

Adam almost laughed out loud at the irony. These days, only a system or two over was considered not very far. A few years ago Kerberos alone had taken months of travel.

At any rate, there was no denying Takashi had followed the tracking signal. Adam didn’t know what he was waiting for, but he couldn’t sit around to see. As soon as he spotted a planet that was suitable he left the place he’d been sitting in at full speed, knowing he only had a short window to get things ready before he was possibly found.

* * * * *

It took Adam an hour to set his trap, which admittedly wasn’t terribly complicated. Find a spot where Takashi wouldn’t die of exposure, bury the tracker, leave a calling card, and activate the cage disc for him to pick up and lock himself in.

Sometimes, it was the simple things that worked the best.

When that was done he left, setting the striker to pick up the tracker frequency on his scan screen. It was still blinking when he landed at the meeting site, a high-altitude plateau overlooking the seemingly endless forests of a relatively green planet. Adam arrived first and remained in the striker, reclined with his eyes closed while he waited.

He felt terrible. The nutrition solution he’d been given had helped a little, he’d been able to actually eat and have his body finally absorb energy from his food, but as Kuro had pointed out it broke down in his system very quickly. He as only getting a fraction of what he should have been, just enough to slow his decline. But the last hour’s exertion had depleted a lot of that, leaving him feeling tired, irritable, and hungry.

His chest hurt. His sides hurt. His back hurt. Everything ached in some way or another and he had the ghost of a headache. He kept getting the urge to just lay down right where he was, the animal instinct to just find a peaceful place to die.

But he also had another urge, one that told him to get up and go. To move, to not give in. It left him feeling angry and aggressive, made it hard to think straight. It was a choice he had never thought he’d ever have to make; lie down to rest and let his body finally shut down completely, or get up and move until something unfortunate wandered into his path for him to rip to shreds to try and feel better.

The soft beeping of the tracker signal stopped, plunging the striker into silence. It had been found and turned off, Takashi had tripped the trap.

Tiredly, Adam disembarked the striker and wandered to the edge of the plateau, looking out at the greenery below. The wind whipped gently around him, cool but not cold here, and the air felt slightly thinner than on Earth. It was a beautiful view, but part of him wished the meeting could have been near water. He missed the sea.

Honerva’s arrival was heralded by the sight of her cruiser entering the atmosphere nearby, the glow of its heat shield making it noticeable for quite some distance. He watched it as it came nearer and eventually came to a stop, holding at an altitude high enough to give it a clear view of any approaching enemies.

“You’re early.”

Adam jumped when he heard the voice behind him, whirling around to find Honerva standing in the middle of the plateau. He hated that she was able to hop from place to place like that, it made her a fucking nightmare.

Not that Honerva needed much help to be part of Adam’s nightmares. He was absolutely terrified of her, but he was here because he had to be. There was no real choice.

“Maybe you’re late,” he answered, trying to make sure his voice remained strong and steady.

“Where are Kuron and Lotor?”

She was in no mood to wait. So this was it, this was the end of it. No banter or fanfare, it was just over. Adam fished a small piece of paper out of his pocket and offered it.

“I have two clones and your son,” he answered. “They’re together, but the Atlas is nearby. You know as well as I do I’m in no condition to physically bring them to you with that backup, you’re going to have to send somebody.”

The paper in Adam’s hands went up in black flames, startling him. It melted back into existence in front of Honerva, who plucked it out of the air to look at it.

“The Lions are with the Atlas?” She asked.

“No. The Lions are helping the others, these three have been separated.”

Honerva continued to look at the coordinates, and Adam began to wonder if they weren’t to her liking. He started to feel even more nervous the longer her silence went, until she finally turned away from him slightly and activated the radio on her helmet.

“Commander Dristok, gather half of your armada and prepare for a hyperspace jump,” she ordered. “You are to destroy the IGF-Atlas and take its Captain prisoner. You’ll also find a second, identical human and Prince Lotor at his location. Bring them to me.”

She pulled up a monitor at her wrist and used it to send the coordinates. A few seconds later a deep voice replied.

“We don’t have this on our maps. This is just past the edge of explored space.”

“Correct. It appears Prince Lotor has taken advantage of our outdated system to hide in unmapped space out past Earth’s system.”

“Very well, preparing to jump.”

This was it. Adam let himself sink down into a crouch, tiredly waiting for this to finish. It was not going to be very long now. Honerva left her radio on, waiting for confirmation that the Atlas had been spotted. He heard the sounds of bridge crew giving and taking orders, and of the ship beginning the jump.

Then he heard screams, just for an instant, followed by the screeching of contracting metal for a fraction of a second before everything went quiet.

“Commander Dristok,” Honerva hailed, but got no response. She spun around to look at Adam, her eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

Now that everything was in motion and there were no choices to make, no chance to back out, Adam felt…calm. Not completely of course, he still felt the drive to tear the life out of something, but he didn’t feel scared. There were only a few minutes left in his life now, at most, and accepting that made him feel almost free.

“Sent half of your armada into a supermassive black hole,” he answered, getting back to his feet and looking out over the trees one last time. “You probably shouldn’t just believe somebody who tells you they don’t know about the mapped universe.”

He’d expected her to move fast, but she still surprised him. One moment she was halfway across the plateau, the next she was in front of him with a hand around his throat. Her grip was like a vise, and her Altean strength let her lift him up until his feet were no longer on the ground. Adam could feel his air being cut off, his neck pained as his full weight pulled on it.

But the opportunity was still more than he had dared to hope for.

He had to fight the instinct to reach up with both hands and pull at the fingers on his throat, had to force himself to stay reasonable and reach into his pocket. He pulled out the syringe, slamming the needle into her unprotected neck and depressing the plunger with one movement, bringing his other hand up to her face. He raked his nails down it, digging in, tearing the flesh and drawing blood.

That pissed her off, a lot. Adam had about a second to suck in air when she threw him away from her before he hit the ground and nearly had the wind knocked out of him again. He leaned down and tore open the lower leg of his flight suit, pulling the knife from its makeshift sheathe and scrambling to his feet. There was nowhere to go on this plateau, which was undoubtedly why she’d picked it, but he still did his best to keep some distance between them.

It quickly became a repeat of the outpost docking bay, the only differences were that this time Adam’s Altean flight suit had a similar level of armor to Honerva’s and he was armed with a style of knife he was well-trained to use in combat. Her magic gave her a clear advantage, letting her disappear from reach whenever he almost landed a blow.

But he kept throwing swings he knew were useless, because he needed her to keep coming at him. He needed to keep her here on the plateau and busy for the next few minutes.

Honerva continued to have the edge, never being in one place long enough for Adam to hit her but repeatedly appearing behind him and landing at least glancing blows before he moved. Twice she caught him by the arm and flipped him, slamming him down on his back into the ground in a way that sent pain shooting through his body. Still, he got up.

And then, Honerva began to slow down.

At first she had trouble phasing in and out, it took her longer and she was visibly frustrated. Finally, she failed completely to get out of harm’s way and Adam’s kick to her gut landed, sending her stumbling backwards.

She backed away, panting, and tried to gather quintessence to hit him with. Adam tensed and waited, but Honerva was unable to continue her attacks.

Considering this was the first and only field test so far, Lotor’s quintessence blocker appeared to work just fine. He was right, they shared the same dark traits in their magic access.

“I don’t know what you did to me, but I assure you,” Honerva snarled, “I don’t need magic to incapacitate you. I made you a very handsome offer and you spit in my face, for that I intend to lock you in a very tiny cage for a very long time.”

Adam paced slowly around her, knowing she was physically stronger. But she wasn’t necessarily faster, and he was more in practice with straight fighting than she was. Now that they weren’t moving so quickly he was able to breathe, the air colored heavily with the scent of the blood running down her deeply scratched face.

“You don’t sound happy,” Adam answered, raising the hand he’d used to gouge her to his lips and licking the blood away from his fingertips. “That’s funny, a few days ago you were really excited to see me go batshit and tear people apart.”

“You’re weak,” Honerva taunted. “You’re a dead man walking. I don’t even need to fight you, I just need you to pass out. You may think you’re going to escape me by dying, but you won’t. I won’t let you. And while you’re trapped in a healing pod being fixed, I will hunt down Lotor and Kuron myself.”

“No you won’t,” Adam answered, pulling a small metal box out of his other pocket. “I made sure they were tucked away nice and safe before I came here. And his name isn’t Kuron.”

Something Lotor had failed to take into account was that Adam didn’t need special space ore to make a bomb. Nor was he inclined to ask out loud for the things he needed when he could literally just take them when no one was looking. He detonated the one he’d made now, exploding the striker and dropping down to cover his head with both hands as it sent metal shrapnel in all directions.

As soon as the worst of the metallic rain was over he was up and moving, running at Honerva from behind as she instinctively turned toward the blast. They weren’t close enough to the striker for it to kill either one of them but she was still forced to stumble backward away from it.

Adam hit her with a two-footed kick in the back that sent them both to the ground, but he was the first one up to his feet. He dropped the knife on the ground beside him and tore the gauze away from his leg to wrap it around Honerva’s throat as he straddled her back, pulling it tight to choke off her air. He bent her head backward with the force of it as he did it, leaning down close.

“His _name_ is Takashi Shirogane,” he snarled. “He was mine long before he was yours, and this is for everything you did to him you spooky bitch.”

He let go of the gauze with one hand just long enough to rip the diadem off her head and throw it away, so he could grab her now-unprotected head by the hair and slam her face down into the ground. He did it two more times then reached around to dig his fingers into her throat, using that grip to flip her over on her back.

*VW*

The knife slammed into her gut, easily piercing light armor that was only meant to protect from physical blows. Once, twice, three times, leaving her making surprised gurgling sounds he could feel around the fingers that were digging their nails into her trachea.

That was the end of his ability to reason. He let go and gave in to the anger that had been simmering, feeling his hand plunge into the open abdominal wound and begin ripping out anything he could grip, but still strangely disassociated from the whole thing. He was aware on some level of all the blood—there was so much blood—and there was no way she was going to survive if he stopped now. But she was still making noises, and for every second that she was alive he wanted her to suffer.

For what she’d done to Takashi. For what she’d done to Lance. For what she’d done to Adam himself, and for whatever she’d done to Lotor.

She deserved to feel every bit of the life literally ripped out of her by something she had made, deserved to know what hell was going to be like before she even got there. Adam didn’t stop until his hands were too slick with blood to do much more, and his grip was too weak to do any more damage. He sat back on his heels, panting, looking down at the mess coating his arms and chest with a sort of dark bemusement.

*/VW*

His mother had been right. She had been right from the beginning, he wasn’t a person. People weren’t capable of this, not even in the wildest throws of anger.

Adam got carefully to his feet and walked slowly to the edge of the plateau, feeling the cool breeze as his legs gave out and he sank down to his knees there. It wasn’t a terrible place to die, he supposed, even if it wasn’t near the sea. There were worse places.

His chest hurt, a lot, and he couldn’t take a full breath. Adam let himself sink down lower, to lie on his back and look up at the sky. It was a lighter blue here than back on Earth, and there were no clouds. That was a shame, the lack of clouds spoiled it. Clouds would have been nice.

He closed his eyes and relaxed, waiting for everything to go away. Everyone was safe now, things would be okay. Adam himself would pass away, and nobody would be able to use him to continue whatever experiments she wanted to use him for. It was a win.

A soft shuffling sound made him open his eyes again and turn his head tiredly toward the middle of the plateau. He was sure at first that he was hallucinating, that he had stopped breathing and his brain was just in the process of shutting down. What he was seeing wasn’t real, it was the figment of a dying mind.

Because Honerva could not be getting up. She could not be rising to her feet in uncoordinated, jerky movements with her insides still spilling out around her.

But Adam knew he wasn’t hallucinating, he knew that was exactly what he was seeing. Even in his twisted mind he couldn’t create what he was watching, the many threads of what looked like a living darkness creeping out from every cut and wound. They writhed like the tendrils of something malicious, and even as far gone as Adam was he could feel the unnaturalness washing across him from it all like waves.

Honerva’s eyes were completely black, looking almost like empty sockets. She stood still, occasionally jerking and writhing like a demented puppet with its strings being yanked, as her tendril-wrapped insides began to snake their way back into where they belonged.

“No. No no no…”

Adam didn’t try to get up. He didn’t have anything left, the pained whisper was all he could manage and even that choked off into tired silence. He could do nothing but watch as this thing—there was no way Honerva had anything Altean left in her, he could see that—put itself back together like a clip from a horror movie.

He didn’t know how long it took, time wasn’t even something he could comprehend anymore. But at length she stopped twitching, stopped hellishly contorting, and cracked her neck as if she’d merely just experienced something mildly uncomfortable. She walked over to him, her movements smooth and normal again, and all he could do was look weakly up at her as she stood over him with a scowl.

“Nice try. Now I think it’s my turn.”


	18. Chapter 18

In general, under the circumstances provided by the current state of the facility, the production of insulin would have taken about a day. The hormone was made out of two attached chains of amino acids, which Kuro would have created using the amino acid sequencer. The two separate chains would be inserted into plasmids, which were small DNA strands that could replicate without referencing the blueprint on the chromosomes.

These newly made DNA strands, along with their new, extra amino acid chains, would be inserted into a harmless strain of bacteria. The bacteria would ferment to make it replicate, in turn replicating and mass producing the insulin amino acid chains. At the end of the process, the mass of bacteria would be broken up by enzymes which would separate out the DNA pieces Kuro wanted.

The two separate chains would be mixed together and bonded in a whole other process, then purified. This would leave him with a batch of artificially produced insulin.

Luferin was another story.

First, Kuro had to unravel the details of the amino acid chain. It wasn’t something he could just look up, he had to sequence it and program the machine to be able to produce it. Luferin, as it turned out, was three amino acid chains rather than two.

Second, it didn’t work with the same bacteria insulin did. Kuro didn’t know why, he just knew that it didn’t. His machinery was advanced enough that it had only taken him an hour or two to sequence the chains, but he had to go through five different strains of bacteria before found one that would replicate it. That took about twelve more hours. And as it turned out, the bacteria that would work replicated at a much slower rate, making it take longer.

It was now about a day after Lotor had left, by Abyss time, and Kuro had three batches of bacteria replicating in separate small vats, each quietly mass-producing one of the three necessary acid chains. The process had just started, so it was going to take three days at the chosen bacteria’s rate of production before he could start figuring out how to break out the strands and put them together into a finished product.

He was sitting at one of the lab tables, his head resting on the table’s surface and his hands hanging down at his sides, waiting. In spite of having to do absolutely nothing at this point the waiting was the hardest part, it drove Kuro up a wall to not be actively doing something.

Maya and Keela had taken a trip down to the recovery facility to see if there was anything they might want to stock the shuttle with in preparation for the fight they knew was coming, and Bandor was sitting at the table across from him. He was paging through a book at a speed that told Kuro he was only turning the pages for something to do and wasn’t actually reading anything.

“So this is exciting,” Bandor said after a few minutes of absent-minded page turning. “Does it always get this wild here?”

“Sometimes I set the lights to flash,” Kuro answered, speaking into the table surface under his face. “It’s like a very quiet rave.”

“Sounds a little too crazy for my blood.”

“It does get pretty titillating.”

Bandor went back to turning pages. Kuro went back to crossing his eyes to try and focus on the nick on the table between them.

“Does it always take this long?” Bandor asked, after a few more minutes had passed.

“It only just started.”

“I know, but I’ve never seen anything done here take so long,” Bandor reasoned. “I know Acxa hasn’t been here in a few decaphoebs, but that’s not long enough for everything here to go obsolete.”

“Everything here usually goes faster because the processes were already in place,” Kuro answered, sitting up and smoothing down his lab coat. “If I was treating diabetes we’d be halfway done. But we’re creating a process from scratch, the original was lost thousands of years ago when it stopped being used.”

“Shouldn’t there be an emergency plan?” Bandor asked. “Obviously insulin can’t be made when bad enough disasters happen, there has to be some kind of temporary quick fix. You can’t tell me everyone with an insulin deficiency just dies during storm aftermath because bacteria fermentation vats aren’t available.”

“Of course they don’t, no advanced species would let that happen,” Kuro scoffed. “For insulin, the emergency plan is to extract it directly from glands in the pancreas of animals.”

“Why can’t you extract luferin from animals?”

“Because luferin comes from aquatic species, we’re nowhere near an ocean.”

Bandor went back to turning pages again. Kuro considered taking a nap, or maybe going through the text on Galran communicable diseases again. He was trying to dredge up the energy to move when a thought occurred to him.

“Space whales,” he blurted out.

“I’m sure you’re saying words, but I only understood half of that phrase,” Bandor answered, turning another page.

“Space whales. The Quantum Abyss has space whales,” Kuro repeated, sliding off his stool and going to dig through a drawer with cutting tools. “On Earth they’re called whales, I don’t know what you call them. But they they’re water animals.”

He jumped a cart that was in his way and darted out of the lab, taking the length of the hallway at a run. Maya and Keela were stepping out of the elevator as he headed for it, both of them looking horrified when they saw him.

“Don’t run with knives!” Keela yelled at him as he passed.

“I’m not, it’s a scalpel!” Kuro answered, sliding into the elevator just as the door was closing.

He headed down to the facility’s basement, where the largest storage spaces were located. At the end of this hall there was a room with specimen pods, generally used for stowing organs between transplants or keeping things for study. Kuro had made good use of this room over the years, tucking away things he had brought in that he either hadn’t had a chance to study yet or had already autopsied and wanted to save for further research later.

It was morbid, but a fresh supply of real bodies was always a good thing to have, they were good for practicing diagnosis and surgery, and for anatomy study.

And Kuro did a lot of anatomy study on things he found here in the Abyss. Some looked exactly the way he expected them to look on the inside based on textbooks of other animal species. Some looked completely different. A lot of them were a mix between the same and different, often in ways that didn’t even make sense.

He was opening one of the specimen pods to take out a creature he had nicknamed a “drifter” when Bandor caught up to him to see what was going on.

“How many of these things do you have?” Bandor asked, peering into the pods as he passed.

“About fifteen years’ worth,” Kuro answered, pulling a cart over to lay the drifter out on it. “What does this look like to you?”

“A mess,” Bandor answered.

“Okay, but besides that.”

“A gray mess,” Bandor elaborated. “But your stitching work is very nice, I like the purple thread.”

“It’s got flippers,” Kuro pointed out. “I mean, okay, it’s kind of a blob right now, but when they’re moving out in space where there’s no air pressure they don’t just...flop like this.”

“We’ll pretend I see the flippers,” Bandor offered. “Keep going.”

“There are two kinds of creatures out here in the abyss,” Kuro said, starting to cut open the abdomen of the drifter. “Ones that walk, which you’ll find on the planets and moons, and ones that fly, which you’ll find out in the space between. At least, I always described what they did as flying in my notes. But when you open a lot of them up…”

He worked away some of the flesh to get to the bones, which were thin and extremely bendy with very little strength to hold up under the gravity of the moon they were on.

“These are more similar to fish bones than animal bones. Most of them don’t have any respiratory system at all since they live out in space, so I just marked them down as lacking lungs. I never thought that maybe they lacked gills.”

“So…they’re some weird kind of water animals?”

“It would make sense, if you consider the possibility that maybe the Quantum Abyss isn’t warped spacetime. Maybe it’s liquid spacetime, the universe’s equivalent of a sea. Which makes this guy a weird species of aquatic predator, which means I need his insides.”

Kuro pulled out several of the organs and dropped them into a jar in an unidentifiable mess, then was back out of the storage room and speeding down the hall. Bandor barely caught up with him as the elevator door closed, politely ignoring the way Kuro repeatedly mashed the elevator button the whole way up as if that might make it go faster.

They got back to the lab and Kuro immediately went to work, almost forgetting to put on gloves as he started running the drifter parts through analysis. It took a few minutes, but they were rewarded for their wait when the list of component hormones came up on the screen.

“They make luferin,” Bandor noted. “How do we get it?”

Kuro already had a pen and paper and was leaning forward across the lab table, scribbling out calculations based on the information on screen.

“With less advanced machinery, we’d have to figure out which organs produce it and find those. But I think the chemical seperator downstairs can process it right out of any tissue that has it. It’s pretty much like just chucking parts into a blender. If all of the drifter samples average the same amount of luferin as this one does, we can probably get about five daily doses out of what I’ve got on ice down there. Which is good, it means I can get it into Adam’s system and the healing pod can actually start making a difference.”

Kuro dropped the pen and slid off the desk, and was back on his way downstairs. He poked his head into the office where he saw Maya and Keela lounging.

“We’re going to go gut some weird squishy things,” he offered. “Want to come?”

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” Keela answered, turning the page of the book she was looking at. “Going to have to pass.”

Bandor caught up with him and leaned against the doorway. “If we get enough monster goop he can let the tall guy with the gold hair out of the cryo pod.”

Keela and Maya suddenly looked much more interested.

“I guess I’m not too busy to help at least a little,” Keela supposed.

“I’m not doing anything anyway,” Maya agreed.

“Basement,” Bandor pointed over his shoulder as the other two Alteans left the room, heading down the hall to the elevator. Kuro watched them go, then looked at Bandor with a raised eyebrow. Bandor smiled. “I have a sister. I know how girls work.”

“So we’re not good looking enough on our own for them to just want to help us out?” Kuro asked as he and Bandor followed. “Man, that hurts.”

He took the three Alteans back down to the specimen lab and began going through the pods to pull out the samples of drifters. He was curious to know whether any of the other animals he had here produced luferin, but that would be something he’d revisit later. For now he’d harvest what he needed, and the synthetic would be ready shortly after that.

Despite their initial unwillingness to help, Maya and Keela had no issues with digging into animal carcasses with knives and scalpel. When Kuro commented, Maya shrugged it off and reminded him that the second colony was still mostly barren, undomesticated land where many people knew how to butcher animals for food.

It painted a very stark picture, and served as a reminder that they needed to liberate Colony One and establish a way to get fresh supply lines to Colony Two.

A couple hours later the organs were in the chemical extractor and they all went to clean up. Kuro headed upstairs to run a status report on Adam so he could see where they stood once they opened the pod. If he’d been stable enough when he went in he might not need to be transferred to a bed.

He was whistling when he entered the pod room, tapping the glowing readout to run a scan, the light inside going on to illuminate its occupant.

As soon as Kuro saw it was Lotor, he shrugged off his lab coat and pulled the gun out of the back of his waistband in one movement, flattening himself against the wall to quickly sweep the room. There was no one, so he he hit the pod release and eased himself out into the hallway, hitting the emergency lockdown on the panel outside the door as he passed.

The lights immediately went out, the hallway flooding with red, and an alarm began to sound announcing the lockdown and requesting that all patients and personnel retreat to a room with a lockable door. Kuro went from room to room, sweeping each carefully, locking down each door once he found them clear. He reached the end of the hallway and locked down the emergency exit, then returned to the pod room.

Lotor was on his hands and knees, his movements sluggish and reactions slow. Kuro checked his pulse and tilted his head up, grabbing the small flashlight from the lab coat on the floor to check his eyes.

“Looks like somebody gave you a little bit of yahoo juice before you went in there,” he commented, hooking the other man’s arm around his shoulder and lifting him to his feet.

He helped him down the hall to the main lab, re-locking the door to seal them in once they were inside, and let Lotor sink down to the floor. Running a scan of the facility, he identified two people in the lab, three Alteans downstairs, and several very opinionated space canines wandering around down by the pathogen rooms. Shutting down the alarms, he checked the hangar and saw that the striker was gone.

He spotted the half-empty syringe on the table on his way back to Lotor. Knowing what the contents was made him wince, but it was also helpful. He went to a locked cabinet and grabbed a bottle of orange liquid, giving Lotor a small shot of that.

“Just breathe steady,” Kuro advised him, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s a stimulant, you’ll be awake and irritated again in no time.”

He turned off the lockdown and made another, more detailed check of the hall, taking a look in each room. Most of the labs were empty since Kuro only used one, though some had things stored in their cabinets. His search found that everything was still locked up, except for one glass case where the hunting knife he used when he went out of the facility had been taken.

The last lab at the end of the hall was where he found Adam’s little den. There were some bits of wire still on the table, some discarded tools from tinkering. Lying on the floor, probably knocked over or dropped in the hurry to leave, was a small metal plate. Words had been carved into it with something sharp, neat letters in straight lines, absent-minded doodling to kill time while waiting for a chance to strike. _If you want to start a war, know what you’re fighting for, you’re all that I adore_. Some kind of poem. Cute, but he didn’t recognize it.

He shoved it in his back pocket and checked the drawers. No real clues, Adam had cleaned up after himself well.

He found Lotor on his feet when he came back, leaning heavily against one of the tables. He checked the other man’s eyes and pulse again, deciding that he would be fine. Physically, at least. Emotionally, he looked about as angry as Kuro had expected.

“I am going to hunt that little brat down and turn him inside out,” Lotor snarled. “He’s going to be a pair of human-skin boots by the time I’m done with him.”

“I don’t think he’d go with your coloring,” Kuro offered, leaning forward over the table with his chin in his hand. “What happened? Aside from the obvious.”

“He faked being passed out, and surprised me with the needle when I came back in from setting up the pod,” Lotor let go of the table finally, rotating his shoulders and trying to stretch away the remains of the sleepiness. “He said he was going on a hunting trip. He took the cage we used on him and some other components. I think he really was putting together an explosive device.”

“There were some wire clippings in the other lab. Do you think he planted a bomb here before he left?”

“No, I don’t think that would serve any point,” Lotor answered. “This place is strictly medical, the only reason he would have to do so would be if he was having a stress episode and equated it with Haggar’s lab. He was far too lucid for that.”

Lotor wavered a bit but was able to keep his feet as he moved to the other table, to open one of the small medical cases he’d left sitting there.

“One of the vials of quintessence blocker is gone,” he murmured, closing the case again. “He spoke of Hag—he mentioned Honerva when he left.”

“Honerva is…?”

“Haggar’s true name.”

If Kuro wasn’t mistaken, there was definitely bitterness there. Lotor sounded like he didn’t want to say the name out loud, or like Haggar having a different name was somehow scandalous. Kuro simply shrugged, indifferent to what they called the crazy witch. He slid off the table and opened the cooling cabinet, checking the contents.

“All three new IV bags are still here,” he declared. “He only took the partially empty one. That stuff is his life line and he knows it, he’s not planning on making it back.”

Kuro went straight for the computer, closing out the medical diagnostic programs that were still open and accessing the facility’s main servers. Medicine was a nice pastime, he loved it and he enjoyed the nice, passive life of a doctor, but that hadn’t been his life in the beginning. He was an engineered super soldier, for good or for ill, and his first year had been spent acting the part.

“The striker has an auto start program that logs every trip,” he told Lotor. “It runs as soon as the ship is started up. These days I use it to keep track of places I stop and explore when I come and go on supply runs, and every six months I take a trip through the Abyss to track what paths through the gravity crush have opened or closed in real time. But in the beginning it wasn’t used for research.”

“This is a reconnaissance program,” Lotor translated, coming to stand beside him and look at the viewscreen and the information coming up on it. “You turned the ship into an extra set of eyes.”

“It logs the route, how long the ship stops and where, and what was near it when it stopped,” Kuro nodded. “It tracks three-hundred sixty-two Galran military channels and records anything it picks up that has certain keywords. It records everything that goes on in the cockpit so all I had to do is make a verbal note out loud. And then it tracks things like radiation levels, atmosphere makeup, and nearby weather patterns whenever it gets close enough to planets.”

“So wherever that striker is, we can not only find it but we can see what’s going on in and around it,” Lotor narrowed his eyes a little, and Kuro supposed he probably shouldn’t let an angry half-Galra find out exactly where the man who was technically his patient was. He was still on a mission to keep Adam alive, after all. “How do we get this information?”

“It saves to a drive on the striker, but automatically uploads to the server here whenever it lands. This newest file would be what we’re looking for…he touched down on a planet not far from here. I’ve been to the system, there’s not much there. The planet he’s on doesn’t have anything Honerva would want, he’s probably taking a break to plan his next move.”

“How long of a head start does he have on us?”

“A little more than a day,” Kuro answered. “Well, if he stayed in the Abyss, which I doubt. So, lucky for us, only about eight hours.”

“That means I’m eight hours late in meeting up with the others.” Lotor looked up at the information on the screen again, then sighed softly and shook his head. “I cannot waste more of my time tracking him down. As much as I’d like to keep his DNA out of Honerva’s hands that colony is existing on borrowed time.”

“I’ll take care of Adam,” Kuro offered, flicking through the system’s various notifications from the last day. “Honestly, he can’t be worse than some of the things out here. Are you expecting a hail?”

“No.”

“Well there’s one that came in about an hour ago,” Kuro brought it up on the communications panel. “No encryption, so it’s not military. I don’t recognize the frequency.”

“I do. That’s a Lion,” Lotor answered, turning up the volume.

“ _This is the Captain of the IGF Atlas, hailing the Lorelia shuttle. Please be advised that there is a Galra armada over Colony One. I repeat, do not approach Colony One. Please make contact with me via frequency channel 81.423, or with the Atlas via frequency channel 42.874.”_

“He sounds handsome,” Kuro quipped.

“Only until you see his haircut,” Lotor replied, grabbing the medical cases. “Get ready to go. Take Bandor with you when you go after Adam, we’ll drop you off down on the surface where you can grab a pod. Once I know what’s going on I’ll let you know whether to join me after. Any objections?”

“None.”

“Armor up just in case,” Lotor advised. “I’ll contact Shiro once we’re out of the Abyss and the signal isn’t slowed. And Kuro?”

Kuro stopped in the doorway, on his way out of the lab to hit the facility’s small armory, glancing back.

“No unnecessary risks on your part,” Lotor requested. “Regardless of what happens to Adam, your number one priority is to return safely. I would like at least one responsibility I’ve taken on to survive in this godforsaken universe.”

“Hey, if you’re giving me leave to be an absolute coward, I accept the offer,” Kuro answered, giving a half salute on his way out of the lab.

The words were meant only for comfort, they didn’t reflect the reality. Kuro had been functioning in these wildlands at the edge of real space for over a decade, he had nearly died on more than one occasion and he was no less adept at dealing with danger than anyone else.

He grabbed Bandor and went to the armory, turning in the light Altean armor he wore regularly for the black, purple and orange uniform of Lotor’s personal landing parties. It was light, it was strong, and it had ankle boosters the other suit didn’t have.

Whether he _wanted_ to fight and whether he _could_ fight were two different things. The skills Haggar—or rather, Honerva—had attempted to upload had taken incompletely, just like the memories, but there were still some things that stuck. Kuro was absolutely useless with any kind of blade, so he holstered a blaster at each hip and slung a short range rifle over his shoulder

Bandor wasn’t comfortable taking any weapon except his staff, and Kuro didn’t make him. He was armed well enough for the both of them.

Lotor dropped them off to pick up a pod down on the planet’s surface, and the two vessels navigated out of the Abyss. They stopped out near its edge, setting their instruments to get proper bearings without the warping of time and space around them.

“This is the Lorelia shuttle, returning hail,” Kuro glanced up at Lotor’s image on his comm screen as the other man attempted to respond to the earlier message. Adam had at least been true to his word and repaired the shuttle’s long range communications, as well as prepping any parts the Lorelia herself would need so they could be taken along. “Requesting further information on Colony One.”

“So this message, it said there’s a Galra armada over the colony and not to go back there?” Bandor asked, inputting commands into his own side of the pod console. “How do you know that’s not some kind of trap?”

“Well, the sender did sound very trustworthy,” Kuro answered, smiling a little. “Honestly, we don’t. We don’t know anything, it’s a very dangerous situation for everyone involved. All I know for sure is that if you’re ever faced with an Altean woman named Honerva, get away very fast. She’s the bigger threat than anyone else skulking around this side of the stars.”

“I repeat, this is the Lorelia shuttle, returning hail,” Lotor said again after getting no response. “Do you copy?”

They waited for a few minutes, but no answer came.

“Are you going to try hailing the Atlas?” Kuro asked, glancing up at Lotor’s image again. “That’s his ship, right? Maybe he’s back on it.”

“Absolutely not,” Lotor said firmly. “The last thing I will do is hail any Earth or human ship that I’m not absolutely certain has someone I’m familiar with on it. It’s very likely that I’m considered a human public enemy, I’m not eager to get shot into pieces or tossed into a brig. And you will not approach or board any human ship either. I have no faith that they won’t consider you alien and treat you as a lab specimen.”

“No human ships,” Kuro promised.

“Good. Because as much as I hate to say it, I’m afraid here is where we part ways,” Lotor answered. “I must get back to the colony and find out what’s going on. If you catch Adam, return to the facility and cryo him until we decide what to do about him. If you don’t catch him, return to the facility anyway.”

“Roger that,” Kuro replied, setting their course and preparing to leave. “I’ll contact you once we land to keep you in the loop.”

He felt something push forward between the pod seats, brushing his arm, and turned to look at Bandor. What he saw instead was a huge, furry head. Kuro and Bandor both screamed at the same time, which made Hoshi decide to howl in solidarity.

“When did you _get_ here?” Kuro demanded, clutching his chest.

“ _How_ did you get here?” Bandor added, leaning away as she stopped howling and started sniffing at them to see what they were doing.

“If you’re both done being frightened by the dog?” Lotor interjected. Bandor and Kuro turned to look at him and Hoshi followed their example, sitting up straight as if she thought she was also being yelled at. “Yes, contact me when you get there. If I pick up any news before you do I’ll contact you first.”

Lotor ended the communication, and Kuro fought Hoshi into the back of the pod. Bandor took over the flying while he wrangled their unexpected companion, who wouldn’t give up until he at least turned his seat and let her rest her head on his leg. She didn’t seem to like being in the pod, which Kuro pointed out was her own fault for being a stowaway. Hoshi remained unapologetic.

Lotor’s destination was about two hours out, but theirs was only one. They soon dropped into orbit around a familiar planet Kuro had visited a few times for research samples. Even so, he did as he always did and went through all the pre-landing safety scans that would be used on a first time landing.

“Not picking up the striker,” Bandor informed him as his own scan finished. “There’s a ship down there, a big one, but that’s it. Three life signs about half a mile from it.”

“If it’s only three life signs then it’s got to be on the desert side of the planet,” Kuro reasoned as they started to drop down through the thin cloud cover that was currently moving across the sky. “There are dens packed on one side, insectoids. But they’re only up and around for short periods, they hibernate for years at a time. I don’t think they’ll be coming up for another couple months, maybe.”

“Insectoids,” Bandor frowned. “What kind of insectoids?”

“You know, insectoids,” Kuro answered. “About five feet tall, lots of eyes, very bitey. Pincers on some of them.”

Bandor went pale, leaning forward look downward as the pod descended to see if he could spot anything moving below.

“Relax, they won’t be up for another few weeks at least.”

“Weeks. You just said months. You have no idea when these things are awake, do you?”

“It’ll be fine,” Kuro shrugged him off, programming the pod to land beside the ship they had picked up. “I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine. It’ll probably be fine. Just run zig-zags, they can’t turn very easily.”

* * * * * *

“No luck,” Curtis announced as he came around the rock outcropping and found Shiro and Matt exactly where he’d left them. “She won’t boot up for me. But I grabbed you some water in case you need it.”

He slid the two small pouches through the openings in the shining net of bars, leaning back against the cage. He had just returned from Blue, from trying her comms to see if he could get in touch with anyone, but to no avail. Her systems wouldn’t start up for him, and there was a jammer hidden somewhere nearby that he hadn’t been able to find. It stopped Shiro from accessing Blue’s comms through his helmet, which couldn’t be gotten out of the cage for Curtis to take out of the jam zone.

“I don’t get it,” Matt slid down to sit on the ground, leaning back against the bars on the other side of Curtis. “This was a lot of work. He made a tracker only you would follow, he lured you to a planet nobody would have any reason to come to ever, he set an actual physical trap to hold you here, and then he left.”

“Well, he was kind of bitter about the break up right up until he disappeared,” Curtis reasoned. “He’s _very_ good at holding a grudge.”

“I don’t think even he would be this petty,” Matt kicked the bars.

“Clearly you haven’t heard about the Nevada incide—“

“No,” Shiro interrupted him, making a ‘shush’ gesture. “His lawyer said not to even talk about it until the statute of limitations is up.”

Curtis obediently closed his mouth and did another walk around the cage, as if he might notice something he hadn’t the last hundred times.

The problem wasn’t that Adam was smart, which he was. Shiro was smart, Curtis was smart, Matt was brilliant. Between the three of them they would have easily handled anyone else on Adam’s intelligence level. The problem was that Adam was manipulative in a way even serial killers could only dream of being, and on the very rare occasion he wasn’t being lazy he was almost impossible to get ahead of.

“Okay, pettiness aside, he had a reason for this,” Curtis stopped circling and took a few steps back from the cage, looking around the whole area instead. “He made a tracker that piggybacked on the signal from Keith’s, so we know that he knew about the one Lance had well before you got the signal. And you said the signal stopped for a while…he’s got a jammer here somewhere, let’s assume he was using that while he was with Lance to stop you from getting the signal initially.”

“Okay, so he was stopping anyone from finding Lance and the others,” Matt chimed in. “But he didn’t want Keith to stay away forever, or he would have just sabotaged the tracker. So he just wanted to delay it.”

“But he only delayed it until he was gone,” Shiro added. “And once it was active, he made sure to add the second one in so I’d see it when we saw Lance’s. Then he disabled it again. I guess to buy himself time to set this up. But what’s the point? It’s not like he couldn’t get me alone any time he wanted if he just waited until he and Lotor came back to the colony. That would have been easiest.”

“But Lotor didn’t go back to the colony,” Curtis remembered. Shiro had mentioned earlier in passing that Lotor was hours late in arriving. “Maybe he decided Lotor couldn’t be trusted but he couldn’t fix the long range communications, so he needed a way to get you here and keep you here until he could deal with him.”

“Or he didn’t do any of this at all and it was a trap by Lotor,” Matt suggested.

“I don’t know,” Shiro took a deep breath, resting his head against the bars. “Maybe he meant to be here. Maybe this was all set up to start automatically, and he's held up wherever Lotor is.”

“You’re all wrong,” a familiar voice came from over by the nearby outcropping. “He went to tack down Honerva, and he locked away everyone she was after before he went. Probably to keep them where she wouldn’t find them.”

It was the oddest sensation, hearing what sounded like Shiro’s voice while looking at him and seeing that his lips weren’t moving. It took Curtis’ brain a few seconds to process that the voice sounded similar but was different, and his head swiveled over toward the rocks. At which point he started to wonder if there was something hallucinogenic in the air on this planet.

The man who had just come around the outcropping and was walking toward them was Shiro, but at the same time he wasn’t. His walk was different, his posture was different. The vivid scar he’d come to expect was nowhere to be seen, and his hair was very, very different. Still completely black, and in a style that gave him a much softer appearance.

Curtis raised his gun in warning, and found he wasn’t alone. In the cage, Matt was now on his feet and he and Shiro had both drawn their weapons. The Shiro impostor was visibly armed, with a short-range rifle hanging down across his front where it could easily be grabbed and aimed.

He kept walking toward them as if he didn’t notice the threat, more interested in something in his hands.

“Kuro,” an Altean boy who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties made a grab for the man but missed, hurrying after him to try to stop him. “Kuro, guns. They have guns.”

“Everybody has a gun these days, you really shouldn’t be that surprised,” the man answered, still not looking up as he reached the three stunned soldiers at the cage.

He raised the thing in his hand to his ear—it was some kind of portable comms unit—and finally looked up at them. As he did, he reached up and put a hand on the muzzle of Curtis’ gun, pushing it downward toward the ground.

“Don’t point that at people, it’s dangerous,” he advised absently, his attention drawing away again as somebody answered his call. “Yeah, it’s me. We’re on site, he’s already gone.”

Curtis looked over at Shiro and Matt, both of whom were just as stunned as he was. They looked back at him and then at each other, as if everyone was checking to make sure they were all seeing the same thing. Curtis looked back at the two new arrivals, and the Altean waved awkwardly at them.

“Oh, no, he left us a present. Three presents, actually, and two are very neatly wrapped.”

The man—the boy had called him Kuro—was slowly beginning to pace in front of the cage. He glanced over at the three of them as he talked, giving whoever was on the other end of his line a rundown of who was there.

“We’ve got a tall nervous guy, a kid who looks like he sells drugs for a living, and…” he paused when his gaze fell on Shiro, turning away slightly and dropping his voice as if to keep him from hearing. “And a very disappointing glimpse into my future.”

“I bet you’re the drug dealer,” Matt said to Curtis.

“I'm Parisian, we don't sell anything unless it's out of a boutique."

“Please be quiet, both of you,” Shiro murmured. He was still staring at Kuro, looking him over from head to toe, trying to process what was going on.

“They’re driving a giant blue metal cat, Lotor, not a big white van with “free candy” on the side,” Kuro was saying. “I think I’ll be fine. Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s Takashi. No, it’s a little hard for me to not know. Fine, hold on a second.”

He lowered the comm from his ear, looking exasperated.

“My mom wants to talk to your mom,” he announced, tossing it up in the air in Curtis’ direction.

Curtis almost dropped his gun as he struggled to catch the device, nearly dropping it before he managed to get a good hold on it. It was similar to a phone, but looked like it patched through the comms system of a ship. He looked at it, not certain what he was supposed to do, then looked helplessly at Shiro and Matt.

“Which one of you is my mom?”

Shiro finally managed to shake off his stupor, motioning for Curtis to hand it through the meshed bars. Curtis did so gladly as Kuro dropped down to pull the cover off a small metal piece at the base of the cage. It had a little screen and a row of five small buttons.

“Lotor,” Shiro said without preamble as soon as the comm was in his hands. “What the hell is going on?”

He moved to the other side of the cage and turned away, as if that might afford him some privacy. Curtis recognized it as what it was, his boss talking to somebody else’s, and he was well-practiced in not listening in on senior officers. He turned his attention to Kuro, who had pulled off his gloves and was fiddling with the buttons.

“Uh…can you open this?” Curtis asked. He didn’t recognize any of the symbols on the buttons, but Kuro seemed to.

“I could if Adam didn’t change the code,” Kuro answered. “But he did, so I guess we’ll see. No worries though, it looks like he used the timer function. It’s set to shut down eight hours after it’s triggered.”

Matt crouched down even with Kuro, staring at him again. The Altean boy had come closer and was now leaning over Kuro to see what he was doing as well, both of them intrigued with him in one way or another. Kuro tried about six different codes before the attention started to get to him.

“Hey Bandor? If you’re gonna be this far up my ass can you at least pull my hair so I can enjoy it too?” He asked. “And Nervous, would you please wrangle Woodstock out of my personal bubble?”

The two got the hint. Instead, Matt backed off a little and turned his attention to the Altean.

“Bandor? Is that a common name for Alteans, or are you seriously Romelle’s brother?”

“I’m seriously Romelle’s brother,” Bandor answered, cocking his head to the side. “Except every third quintant, then I’m jokingly her brother.”

 _Oh, God, there are two of them_ , Curtis thought when Matt chuckled at that.

He crouched down next to Kuro himself now that those two were going at it, taking a good look at him without invading his space. The longer he looked the more differences he saw between Kuro and the Captain, like the lighter scar that ran from the left corner of his mouth down past his jaw to his neck. Kuro had some kind of black gemstone stud in his left ear and two small, silver rings in the outer cartilage above it, and his fingernails had a deep blue lacquer. All things that Curtis got the feeling Shiro would rather die than wear. Still, the resemblance was uncanny.

“So I noticed you already knew the Captain’s name,” Curtis commented. “Even though he doesn’t seem to know you. Are you his older brother or a cousin? Is this one of those telenovela situations where you ran away from home as a teenager when he was too young to remember you or something?”

“That sounds wonderfully dramatic, but no,” Kuro answered. “We’re not even related. Why do you ask?”

“The fact that you two look a lot alike kind of jumps out.”

“Really?” Kuro asked, frowning slightly. “I don’t see it. Oh! There we go.”

The cage shimmered, then the net of light retracted, leaving behind only the metal capture disc. Kuro turned it off and pocketed it, getting back to his feet as Shiro looked around to see they were free.

“No, he got it,” Shiro was saying. “Yes, I’ll send them back. And I’ll message ahead to Pidge and Hunk that you’re on your way.”

He turned off the comm, taking and holding a deep breath for a moment before slowly releasing it and turning back to them. He eyed Kuro again, handing the little device over.

“How does that even work here?” Matt asked. “As soon as we turned off the tracker we set off some kind of jammer that killed our communications.”

“Oh, the jammer is our tech,” Kuro answered, sliding the comm into a pocket of his uniform. “I say ‘ours,’ I mean Altean. But so is the comm, when it reads a jammer nearby it’s programmed to broadcast its signal to the jammer itself and use it as a relay to transmit. It’s kind of pointless to jam your enemy’s signals if you can’t take advantage of the blackout to communicate with your own side.”

“Lance said Acxa was able to use her own tech in the blackout zone back on Earth,” Shiro commented to Matt. “That’s probably why.”

He paused again, looking a bit bewildered. Curtis didn’t blame him, this day was starting to get pretty wild already and by Earth time it was only about ten in the morning.

“Okay. K…Kuro?” He seemed to feel strange talking to his doppelganger and to have trouble saying his name, as if doing so made the situation all too real. Kuro realized his error and looked apologetic.

"Ah... 鉄𠅙です. でも、 みんな は 私 お 黒 と 呼びます. 𠅙と よん..."

He was going off, rattling off any number of things in Japanese that Curtis couldn’t understand. As a Communications officer Curtis was semi-fluent in all the most common Earth languages; on top of his native French he knew English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. Japanese wasn’t one of them. He just barely knew enough to understand Kuro was a nickname, but Kuro didn't talk like a formal language instructor and Curtis didn't understand most of the words or the phrasing.

It didn’t help when Shiro answered in turn. The two shot responses back and forth at a rapid fire pace, and the only reason Curtis knew that Shiro was asking Kuro questions about himself was because Kuro had a lot of faint pauses as he came up with answers and tended to gesture toward himself a lot.

Bandor seemed to understand, however. Thanks to having Kuro in his ranks, Lotor’s translation tech probably included both English and Japanese.

After a somewhat short exchange, Shiro looked no less uncomfortable than he had in the beginning. But the many questions Curtis had about this newcomer—and his eerie resemblance to his Captain—had to wait.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Kuro switched back to English, and now addressed Curtis and Matt in addition to Shiro. “Adam is sick, extremely so. I need you to imagine a diabetic without insulin, he has a similar problem but with a hormone you’ve never heard of because it’s not found in Earth life. Are you aware of his family background?”

“He’s only half human, yes,” Shiro answered. “Half alien.”

“Okay, no, I wasn’t aware of that,” Curtis blurted out. Shiro said it so calmly, like it was common knowledge, but from Matt’s stunned face Curtis wasn’t alone in being left in the dark.

“I only found out just before Keith and I left,” Shiro answered, frowning. “When I talked to Lance he said Adam might be sick, but he wasn’t sure and he didn’t say it could be this bad."

Kuro glanced over at Bandor, then looked back to the rest of them. He took a step back, sweeping an arm to indicate the direction he’d come from.

“I think we all need to go back to the ships,” he suggested. “I need to try and figure out where Adam is now, and you need to see the data we have.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random little fun facts:
> 
> 鉄𠅙 = Kurogane (iron) Ryou (bright/shining)  
> 銀貴 = Shirogane (silver/platinum) Takashi (precious)  
> 白 = Shiro = White  
> 黒 = Kuro = Black
> 
> Also of note:
> 
> 黒鋼勇 = Kurogane (black steel) Isamu (courage)
> 
> In the original Golion series that Voltron is based on, the black paladin Takashi Shirogane (the pilot of the blue lion) has a younger brother, Ryou Shirogane. Takashi dies taking a fatal blow protecting Isamu Kurogane (the blue paladin, who piloted the red lion). Ryou vows to avenge his brother's death and does so, but dies himself in the process.
> 
> To cover their deaths for an American audience, when Voltron: Defender of the Universe was created, Takashi and Ryou were combined into one character named Sven. Sven was the pilot of the blue lion until he was wounded by a fatal blow meant for Isamu's counterpart, Lance. Instead of dying in this version, he's sent to another planet to recover and Princess Allura becomes the pilot of the blue lion. The planet Sven is recovering on is attacked by Zarkon and Sven is taken prisoner, but escapes and rescues Princess Romelle in the process. The two end up married. 
> 
> In Legendary Defender, Shiro's alternat-reality counterpart Sven being injured saving Lance is a call back to DotU Sven saving DotU Lance in the same way.


	19. Chapter 19

Shiro leaned back against the wall of Blue’s cargo hold, arms crossed, staring down at the floor while the others spoke. The pod wasn’t big enough for everyone so they’d retired in here, and Kuro was using some kind of Altean tablet that had a holographic monitor to show them the information he had.

He felt sick in a way he didn’t have the words to describe. The dog tags hanging around his neck, engineered from the lightest of steels so they wouldn’t distract in combat, felt like the weight of worlds.

He was too late, that was the conclusion he was forced to come to. Kuro’s tone was hopeful but he had made it perfectly clear that not only was Adam short on time—as in hours rather than days—but it was very possible that time had already run out and they might not find him alive.

Six months wasted. Six months Adam had spent in confinement while Shiro went to work every day with no sense of urgency. Six months spent having his body turned against him while Shiro’s biggest concern was keeping the MFE pilots in line. Six months Adam had spent fighting for his right to live another day while Shiro and the people who should have sounded the alarm over a supposedly dead soldier with no body as proof all went home each night to decent food and comfortable beds.

Six months since Earth had been liberated, six months that nobody had paid enough attention. Six months of opportunity, untaken, only for the final few hours he had to make things right to slip through his fingers like sand.

To say he was angry was an understatement. He had already been angry when he’d found out nobody had bothered to consider the fact that a missing body might mean a living POW. What he felt now, having had his chance to save Adam squandered so carelessly by Garrison leadership, was so far beyond angry he couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before. Adam was the bitter one out of the pair of them, the one who hated everything in the universe and didn’t bother to hide it, Shiro had never understood that feeling before. He understood it now.

“So you guys really think he decided to go after Honerva since he had nothing to lose?” Matt asked the question, sounding far more somber than Shiro was used to hearing. “I can see him doing it, but what proof do we have that’s where he went?”

Kuro had just finished giving them a rundown of Adam’s full condition, on his state of near organ failure as well as the possibility that if they did find him they could get seriously hurt if they got too close. Adam had always been one to pick a fight, whether he could win it or not, but the thought that he might kill one of them in his current state? That Lotor had interrupted him in the act of cornering that one Altean kid? Shiro could barely process that.

“Circumstantial evidence. Lotor’s addiction follows the same script Honerva’s did,” Kuro answered. “He’s spent his whole life trying not to fall down the same rabbit hole she did, and for the most part just having more willpower than her has helped. But in the last five years or so he finished creating a treatment based on the genome of non-gifted Alteans, it’s a two-step program.

“One shot stops him from being able to manipulate quintessence at all, for a forced complete cleanse. The second stops him from getting that high from it once he’s open to using it again. Both of them only work on Lotor because he seems to tap power from a different place than others. But since he picked that up from his mother, it stands to reason they would work on her too. Well, some of that serum is missing. Adam took it with him when he left.”

“So he’s going to hit her where it hurts and then take her down while she’s weak,” Curtis deduced. “I see a couple problems with this plan, but the biggest one is why he even thinks he’s going to get close to her. Especially if he’s not at his strongest either.”

“For the same reason he knew she’d was after Lotor and I specifically,” Shiro finally spoke up, still glaring at the floor. “He’s been in contact with her.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Curtis said. “If he finally escaped, why would he keep in touch with the psycho who kept him locked up?”

“No, it does make sense,” Matt seemed to see where Shiro was going. “The whole point in engineering him to need her is to make sure he never runs away. It’s to make sure he always comes back on his own, so she doesn’t have to track him down. So maybe he reached out to her to make a deal, just like she expected him to.”

“And she tells him that she’ll take care of him if he brings her Shiro and Lotor?” Curtis started to pick up on their train of thought. “So she definitely expects him to take a few days to get them both and isn’t suspicious when he takes some time to set traps.”

“That’s why he wouldn’t take treatment,” Shiro balled his hands into fists, wishing he could punch something. Preferably Honerva’s face, repeatedly. “If he was healthy, she’d know as soon as she saw him that he was planning something. He knew he had to be dying or she wouldn’t let him near her.”

“It’s still a lot,” Matt said. “He’s not a dumb guy, even he knows when to back down. This is the kind of fight he should have left alone, he already knew we were getting ready for this war. He didn’t have to do this.”

“Did you know he’s not an orphan?” Shiro asked. He already knew the answer, of course they didn’t know.

“I thought his parents died in a car crash,” Curtis frowned. “That’s what he told me. I mean, we just found out his dad is actually an alien, but I figured that just meant only his mom died.”

“That’s what he told everyone,” Shiro finally looked up from the floor. “His story was always that his parents were dead, that he went to boarding schools on scholarship instead of living in a group home, and that he got his money when he turned eighteen from a lawsuit over his parents’ deaths.

“But his mother’s alive, he’s way richer than you think, and he got the money as an incentive to stay away from the family. Believe me, if Honerva tried to manipulate him she probably flipped every switch his mother ever did. He’d know the smart move was to walk away, but he wouldn’t be able to do it.”

“He also knows what she did to you,” Curtis added. “That message you sent back with Sam…I never saw what was on it, but he was really upset about it. And he’s very fond of Lance. Take all that together, and I can see why he’d decide to go after her.” 

“Shiro?” Pidge’s voice filtered out from the cockpit, coming in over the comms now that they were out of the jam zone. “Shiro! You’re going to want to hear this!” 

He pushed away from the wall and went to drop down in the pilot seat, declining to pull up her image on the video feed. He didn’t know yet what to tell everyone about Kuro, and he didn’t want her to see him. 

“What have you got?” 

“We’ve been keeping an eye on the Galra ships and monitoring their chatter. This broadcast just came through,” Pidge answered. “Patching it through now.” 

Her voice faded, replaced by the exchange she was monitoring between the Galra ships. In the background he could hear them still talking, but what she sent to him was a spooled recording staring from the beginning. 

“ _Commander Dristok, gather half of your armada and prepare for a hyperspace jump.”_

Shiro tensed at the sound of Honerva’s voice. He thought he’d be prepared for the kind of memories it would bring back, but it still hit him hard. Behind him, the others had filtered into the cockpit to listen. 

_“You are to destroy the IGF-Atlas and take its Captain prisoner. You’ll also find a second, identical human and Prince Lotor at this location. Bring them to me.”_

Coordinates followed. Blue automatically began mapping them on his screen. 

_“We don’t have this on our maps. This is just past the edge of explored space.”_ It sounded like the Galra Captain responding. 

_“Correct. It appears Prince Lotor has taken advantage of our outdated system to hide in unmapped space out past Earth’s system.”_

_“Very well, preparing to jump.”_

“Pidge, is the Atlas still near you?” Shiro asked, trying to figure out what was going on. “Did it go back to Earth space?” 

“No, it’s still here,” Pidge answered. “Lotor’s here, but he’s not on it. Obviously neither are you or this other human she’s looking for. We’re outside of the sweep range of the cruisers, there’s no way they’ve spotted us either.” 

“Guys, those ships are in formation and are ready to jump, and I think this is about to get really messy,” Hunk chimed in. “Those coordinates? No, they’re not in Galra-mapped space. Their maps only reach just short of Earth…but these coordinates have definitely been mapped by Earth scientists. That’s LANI-582.” 

“They’re about to jump into Charybdis?” Matt blurted out. 

“Charybdis?” Curtis came closer, leaning against the back of the pilot seat to look at the map. “I’m not as familiar with some of these things as you guys are, help me out here.” 

“It’s a supermassive black hole at the heart of Laniakea,” Shiro answered, zooming in on that part of the map. “It was only clearly documented by astrophysicists about twenty years ago.” 

“They jumped,” Pidge reported. “Half a Galra armada is officially not our problem anymore.” 

“But we’re left with another problem,” Shiro answered. “Somebody just lured half an armada into a black hole by telling Honerva the Atlas was there with Lotor and me aboard. Can you trace that transmission back to find out where she is?” 

The star map on Blue’s screen zoomed out from the section of space where Charybdis sat. It started to shift the view further into Galra space. 

“Wow, that was fast,” Curtis praised. 

“I haven’t done anything yet,” Pidge answered. “My scanner’s still tracing it.” 

“Somebody’s done something,” Matt replied as the map settled on a planet in a vaguely familiar system. “We have a location already.” 

The map flickered out, minimizing into the corner of the screen. Blue’s controls began booting up, her systems going through a pre-combat diagnostic that Shiro had done nothing to initiate. He felt the vibrations of her thrusters starting up, and the familiar, indescribable feeling of the stabilization field settling over the cockpit to keep its occupants steady and balanced during takeoff and flight. 

Adam had to still be alive. Probably not for long, but it looked like Shiro still had a slim chance. 

“Guys, Blue has a lock,” Shiro told Pidge and Hunk, this time patching in the Atlas bridge as well. “And she’s about to take us there whether we’re ready or not. Coran, can you hear me?” 

“Loud and clear.” 

“Check the jump crystals. Get Allura on board to charge them up if necessary…I don’t know what we’re going to find when we get where we’re going. We may need you to join us for backup or we may need a wormhole for extraction.” 

“Will do. Right now we have four of the five charged.” 

“Good. Has anyone heard from Keith and Lance?” Shiro wondered. He felt the pressure of acceleration as Blue started to ascend, indifferent as to whether her occupants wanted to accompany her or not. Just out of curiosity Shiro tried the controls, but as he expected nothing happened. “Do we know what’s going on down on the ground there?” 

“The storm we were tracking has hit full swing, so we can’t contact them,” Hunk answered. “We did manage to get through to Keith a little bit before it rolled in, so they do know the Galra ships are here.” 

“Well, we have Sincline and four out of the five Lions,” Shiro reasoned. “Five if Blue will let me stick around, but that’s iffy. Plus the Atlas. The question isn’t if we can take out those ships, we definitely can, it’s if we can take them out before they destroy the colony. Everybody hold where you are, wait for me to call in.” 

He ended the transmission and took a deep breath, pulling his helmet off and getting up out of the pilot seat as the planet fell away and they moved out into open space. He gave the curious men standing around a careful look, taking stock of their situation. 

Curtis and Matt were both armed and armored, and had left the Atlas knowing there could be a fight. They were prepared, and he knew they were both skilled soldiers. Bandor was a soft target, that was obvious from just a glance. It was entirely possible he could defend himself against a normal attacker with the staff he carried, but he wore only flight clothes that didn’t offer much protection and that was a liability when his only weapon was a closer range one.. 

Kuro was a wild card. From the way he wore and handled his weapons he seemed to know his way around guns, but that was all that Shiro knew. In their brief exchange back on the planet’s surface Kuro had confirmed that he was a clone from Honerva’s Kuron Project, but the details had been pushed aside for later in favor of the problem of finding Adam. 

“I don’t know what we’re about to walk into, but I do know all three people Lotor wanted to keep far away from Honerva are probably about to be facing off with her all in the same place,” Shiro told them. “The priority is making sure nobody gets taken prisoner. It’s not to capture her, it’s not to take her down, it’s to make sure all of us walk away.” 

He didn’t have a great feeling about this. It had been a long time since he’d faced off against Honerva, and she only seemed to be getting worse. 

“Be on your guard at all times,” he warned. “This woman crushed an entire outpost into pieces and set a whole planet to burning. There’s no telling what she could do to the five of us.” 

* * * * * * * * * * 

_**Years Ago**_ : 

“So do new arrivals always get the good looking tour guide?” 

Shiro smiled his best fake smile, the one he pulled out when the really annoying kids started bothering him on school visits or when the insufferable superior officers caught him up in conversation. He remained polite, as he always did, and pretended not to notice the flirting. 

“No ma’am. The good looking tour guide was busy today, that’s why you got me.” 

He wasn’t terribly happy about the day’s current progression. Everything had been going great until he’d arrived on base, then it had all gone downhill from there. 

It was Shiro’s birthday today. His actual birthday, February 29th, he was twenty. He was officially no longer a teenager, which was one step closer to finally being respected. He had been leading his own unit since shortly after graduation but there were some people who still scoffed at his abilities simply because he’d still had a one at the beginning of his age. 

He’d gotten up early as always and gone out for his morning jog. The cold had kept a lot of people indoors, so his run had been blissfully quiet and all the more enjoyable. He’d returned home to get ready for the day and come out of the shower to find Adam had made breakfast as usual. Shiro had never asked him to do so, it was just something that had become the norm. He preferred to warm up for the day by moving around the kitchen instead of exercising outside in the morning. 

Shiro liked the way his mornings went. He liked being able to get out in his very nice neighborhood—one he definitely wouldn’t have been able to afford on his own—and go for runs without worrying about crime. He liked coming back inside on a crisp winter day to home cooked food. And he really, really liked having a few quiet minutes with his fluffy, sleepy roommate before Adam woke up enough for the claws to come out for the day. 

If he was being perfectly honest, what he liked most about his life in general was Adam. But they were in a weird place. 

They’d known each other since their second year, but hadn’t really gotten to know each other until they’d first become roommates in their last. That had still been bumpy, and their friendship hadn’t been natural. For whatever reason, they’d both actively chosen to put in a lot of effort to become friends, they hadn’t really seemed to fit until shortly after graduation. But once it finally clicked… 

It was like two puzzle pieces sliding neatly into place. Without the rigorous and sometimes strenuous rules of living in a military academy dorm they were free to be their own people, and at that point they had slid together seamlessly. 

Adam didn’t need a roommate, and even if he’d just felt more comfortable having one there were plenty of people he could have found in his own tax bracket to live with, but he’d actively chosen to offer that spot to Shiro. He paid two thirds of the expenses while Shiro picked up the other third, and Adam did the cooking and laundry while Shiro took care of the finances and the more general cleaning. Adam fixed the cars, Shiro did the grocery shopping. Adam remembered all the birthdays and anniversaries Shiro couldn’t manage to, and Shiro made all the decisions Adam studiously refused to acknowledge needed to be made. 

Separately, they were messes. Together they were one bigger, worse mess, but it was a happy, perfect mess. 

At least, it was almost perfect. They were the kind of pair other people compared their own relationships to, except for one important element that was missing: the romantic one. And that was what made things weird. 

Shiro couldn’t pinpoint when, exactly, he’d fallen in love with his flight partner, he only knew that it had happened after graduation. Having their own space, a little bubble of territory where he had a say in who came and went, had mellowed Adam out a lot over the last year. He could still be impossible sometimes and downright aggressive at others, but overall he was softer, more gentle, and more kind than he had been as a student. 

He had become pretty much everything Shiro had ever thought he could want in a partner; he was attentive, he was caring, he was smart when he actually wanted to show it. He was also really, really attractive.

Shiro’s day had started out so nice because sometimes, if he was lucky, Adam slept without a shirt and didn’t bother to put one on when he came out to the kitchen. Today had been one of those mornings.

Then Adam had offered to take him out to dinner for his birthday, which was another huge win. Shiro knew there was nothing romantic behind it, but whenever they went out explicitly to hang out together Shiro always had his roommate completely to himself. Adam would turn off his phone and forget about work and give him his undivided attention. Times like that, Shiro found it very easy to pretend.

What made it even easier to pretend was that he already knew what some of what would come after a real date would be like. He didn’t have to imagine what it was like to kiss Adam, or shove him back onto a bed to pin him down, or kiss his neck while fingers ran through his hair. He had already experienced that before, even if Adam didn’t remember it at all.

And Shiro knew it made him an idiot, but he did kind of have some hope. Not for the present, but maybe for the future. Adam was currently dating-but-not-really a woman named Rebecca…who up until transitioning a year ago had been a man named Ryan. He liked to think that meant Adam was pretty open to different things, maybe open enough to give him a shot someday.

So he’d started out his morning with a nice run, a good breakfast, and a gorgeous, half-naked man in ridiculously expensive pajama pants offering to take him out to dinner. The day had been going good.

Now…he was here.

Shiro had not been told ahead of time that Theresa Bradley would be joining his unit. He hadn’t even known who Theresa Bradley was before fifteen minutes ago. Yet here he was, walking down a Garrison hallway with one of the sorriest excuses for a soldier he’d ever seen in his life. And that was really saying something, given the low points he’d seen his own team at.

Second Lieutenant Bradley was the daughter of Brigadier General Nathan Bradley, and it showed. She was the kind of person the Garrison liked to pretend didn’t actually exist, underskilled and only in her position because people wanted to curry favor with her father. Shiro didn’t know what to expect from her in terms of piloting skills, but he didn’t have very high expectations.

He was already having issues with how casual she was, how often she kept touching his arm and the fact that she’d called him Takashi immediately after introductions instead of Captain Shirogane. He had corrected that very quickly, but he wasn’t sure how to stop the flirting.

They reached the locker room where the rest of the unit would already be getting ready for the flight maneuver practice they had scheduled for today, and he opened the door to hold it for her. They were immediately met with unholy screeches that echoed through the room.

Adam was sitting on a bench in front of the lockers while one teammate, Valerie, held out an open bag of mini marshmallows. Their other teammate, Danicka, had a piece of paper held up against a locker and was making tick marks on it to keep track.

“43!” Danicka announced as Adam carefully put another marshmallow in his mouth.

“It’s 44,” Val corrected, handing Adam another one. “Stop cheating.”

“I’m not cheating, it’s 43!” Dani insisted.

“Your thumb is over one of the tick marks, dumbass.”

Adam started to laugh and had to slap his hands over his mouth. He took a moment to compose himself and then motioned with his fingers that it was indeed 44.

“What are they doing?” Bradley whispered.

“Disappointing me,” Shiro murmured with a sigh.

“45,” Dani announced. “I think he hit his limit.”

“No he hasn’t,” Val insisted before looking down at Adam. “No you haven’t. Look, do ten more and I’ll split the bet money with you.”

“You can’t do that!” Dani protested.

Adam took the challenge, sliding off the bench to settle on his knees so he could lean back against it. He carefully tilted his head back and held out a hand for more marshmallows, and Val counted out ten more.

“Holy shit, I don’t think he has a gag reflex,” Val marveled after he’d managed to get five more in. “Do you think he’ll suffocate?”

Dani was clearly on the losing end of whatever number of marshmallows the girls had been betting on. But she wasn’t about to go down without a fight. She scooted a little closer, leaning over so Adam could see her.

“Just so you know, when we said you’d probably die on your knees with your mouth full this isn’t what we meant.”

Adam couldn’t get the last few marshmallows into his mouth. He started to laugh and had to put both hands over his mouth again, and this time he had trouble calming down. While it was definitely funny to an extent, Shiro was honestly a bit concerned that he might hurt himself. He was about to put an end to their game when the door opened and Commander Iverson entered.

Shiro straightened up immediately. The other three noticed and scrambled to fall into line, Val doing the best to hide the bag of marshmallows behind her back. Adam fell in between the two girls, but Shiro only got a quick second to see him struggling to pretend everything was fine before Iverson reached them and he had to look forward.

Iverson didn’t look pleased when he gave them a onceover, but the fault didn’t seem to lay with them. His gaze lingered on Lieutenant Bradley in a disapproving way, which was probably the only thing that saved Adam from his obvious struggle being noticed.

“Lieutenant Bradley,” Iverson greeted her curtly before turning to Shiro. “Captain Shirogane. I apologize for the surprise, but our pending transfer had her application brought over personally by some higher officers.”

Everyone knew that meant Bradley had gotten here under somebody’s orders rather than by her own achievement. Except Bradley, she looked proud of herself.

“I’ve made sure her recommending officer is aware that this Garrison base has an extremely high bar,” Iverson continued, looking back at Bradley. “Especially this unit. There are a lot of pilots who want to be in this unit just so they can say they fly with Captain Shirogane, Lieutenant. Let me be perfectly clear: your references have only gotten you an audition. You’ll join the unit this week, and then the Captain will give me his recommendation in five days. He is under no obligation to accept you. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir!” Bradley answered, too enthusiastically for Shiro’s liking.

He got the feeling she didn’t understand, and was just assuming she was now part of this unit. She was going to be very disappointed in five days, he already knew she wouldn’t be a good fit.

“Good. Captain, I won’t hold you up any longer. At ease, men.”

Iverson turned away, giving Bradley one last look, and left the locker room. Shiro assumed he was insulted that someone would try to worm their way into his chain of command without earning it.

As soon as he was gone, Val and Dani turned as one and each slapped a hand on one of Adam’s cheeks, effectively squeezing his face while he was distracted and making him choke. He spit marshmallows halfway across the locker room, doubling over and coughing so hard he had to sink down to his knees.

“Oh shit, we killed him,” Dani murmured, nudging him with her foot as he let himself fall forward to lay face down on the floor, still coughing. He managed to raise one hand and give them both the finger.

“Okay kids, play time is over,” Shiro interrupted, clapping his hands for attention. “Grab your helmets and get out to the hangar. That includes you, Lieutenant Bradley.”

“Can I get a minute here?” Adam asked from the floor. “I just deepthroated Stay Puft and I think my throat is collapsing.”

Shiro sighed and went over, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him up. Before Adam could do anything Shiro knelt down and threw him over his shoulder, carrying him out of the locker room even as he continued with a mixture of coughing and laughing.

Adam was heavy, but he could handle it. Besides, now that he’d picked the idiot up he was committed to carrying him out to the hangar so he didn’t look weak.

“Helmets,” he called back to the others. “And somebody grab this moron’s helmet too while you all get your asses out to the hangar!”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current Day**_ :

“I’ve got a visual on Lotor’s cruiser,” Shiro called to Hunk and Pidge, and now also Allura as the Sincline’s long range comms were finally brought back into commission. Blue wouldn’t let him change course at all but she let him work the scanners, and he was doing his best to get the lay of the land before they were thrust into a fight. “We’re coming up on it fast, but it looks stationery. I’m not picking up any life signs on it, she must be alone.”

“She parked it there unattended? Oh, that’s too perfect,” Kuro declared. He had his helmet visor in place and was running out of the cockpit before Shiro could ask what he meant.

“Where is he going?” Shiro demanded. “Somebody find out what he’s up to!”

“I got it,” Curtis sighed, putting his own screen in place just in case and following.

It was pointless for Shiro to have asked. A moment later a little red alert popped up on the screen telling Shiro the upper airlock had opened, and bringing up a view of Blue’s outer cameras showed Kuro sprinting along the Lion’s head like there was nothing dangerous at all about riding the outside of a ship that was just barely within the atmosphere.

It got worse as Blue passed the cruiser. Curtis had just about reached Kuro but wasn’t able to stop him as the other man leaped, and then after barely a second of hesitation he followed. Shiro was sure they were about to plummet to their deaths but Kuro’s armor had boosters, and he grabbed Curtis as he used them to get some extra distance. They both hit the surface of the cruiser hard, rolling a little, but they survived.

“I said our priority was for nobody to get captured!” Shiro exclaimed, switching on their comms connection. “Not for two idiots to climb into the enemy ship and capture themselves!”

“It’s _one_ idiot and a babysitter!” Curtis shot back.

“The babysitter is still on an enemy ship with no backup and no idea what the hell he’s doing!” Shiro groaned. “Look, both of you just try not to get killed…that thing is hovering up there because Honerva can teleport to it!”

Blue dropped below the height of the cruiser and Shiro lost sight of them. Both Kuro and Curtis went momentarily silent, neither of them having considered the possibility that they might be napping in the cottage when the three bears got home. And the worst part of it was that he couldn’t really say too much, because he and Kuro were definitely alike. Kuro was just doing what Shiro would have been doing if their roles were reversed.

Shiro couldn’t spare them any more attention. The scanners had picked up life signs and he was zooming in on a plateau up ahead. He saw Honerva there, standing near the edge and lifting someone up off the ground by their hair.

By his hair, rather. Bronze hair it was impossible not to recognize.

“Oh, that doesn’t look good,” Bandor said from behind him. Shiro had almost forgotten he was there. “We have to get down there. Hoshi! Can you help us out?”

Shiro was already getting up to make his own exit, fully prepared to tuck and roll out of Blue’s lower entrance as she passed, when a furry gray face poked into the cockpit. For a moment Shiro suffered a brief disconnect as he thought he was looking at Kosmo, but this one was gray and a bit smaller.

“When did _that_ get here?” Shiro asked in surprise.

“ _How_ did it get here?” Matt marveled.

“She popped into the hold after we took off and she’s been there since,” Bandor answered, as if that was perfectly obvious. “Come on, are you staying or are you going down there?”

Shiro didn’t have time to argue. He grabbed Matt’s arm and put a hand on Hoshi’s back the way Bandor did, and then for an instant everything went dark and he felt cold. When light flooded his gaze again he was down on the plateau, and Hoshi was popping off again to probably track down Kuro.

At least he and Curtis would have a way off that cruiser if anything went down. They were going to have to invest in a few more of those teleporting wolves, they really came in handy.

Shiro swiveled around and spotted Honerva across the plateau, standing a bit sideways with her back to them. On the viewscreen he had thought she was pulling Adam to his feet but that clearly wasn’t the case. Adam was completely limp in her hold, she held him by the hair and was lifting him as if to drag him away from the edge.

There was so much blood. He could see it on the ground in the middle, smeared and splattered all over the place, and he could see it coating Adam’s chest, arms, and even some streaks on his face and neck.

Shiro felt something snap. He took off running before the others could stop him, closing the distance quickly and slamming into Honerva with his entire body. She was forced to let go of Adam as Shiro’s momentum sent him and her both rolling across the ground, the pebbles and gravel littering the surface sending Shiro skidding over the edge.

He drew his bayard at the last second, slamming the blade into the ground and keeping himself from going over completely, hauling himself up and back to his feet just as Honerva began to recover. She was covered with blood as well, her flight suit torn and hanging in shreds in some places.

Shiro wasn’t sure what was going on there. His assumption had been that all of the blood, or at least most of it, was Adam’s. Now he couldn’t tell, she was too coated in red for him to clearly see injuries.

Matt caught up to them then, coming at her from behind, but she must have noticed Shiro’s gaze flick over her shoulder. Honerva turned at the last minute and grabbed Matt’s staff, yanking it out of his hands and spinning further to counter a blow Bandor was trying to get her with. She tossed the staff up into the air so she could grab the very end and then dropped down, spinning and taking all three of them down by sweeping their legs out from under them.

It was not a good start. But Shiro wasn’t leaving here without Adam, no matter what. He jumped quickly to his feet and moved in, coming at her with a weapon much more dangerous than a staff.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years Ago**_ :

“Will I have a call sign since I’ll be flying?” Bradley asked as they crossed the hangar. “I don’t have one yet, this is my first unit assignment. I’d like something cute…how about Skydancer?”

Shiro felt Adam reaching for help from Dani and Val for the third time and turned slightly, effectively pulling him out of their reach as they arrived at the parked fighter jets.

“You don’t get to pick your call sign,” he informed her, leaving Adam stuck hanging over his shoulder for a few more seconds before flipping him off and dropping him on top of a couple of nearby crates. “Once you’re _accepted_ into a unit, your teammates pick one for you. You’ll just be going by Bradley.”

“Oh,” she looked disappointed, as if a call sign was the most important thing about piloting. As if she wasn’t about to be thousands of feet in the air breaking the sound barrier in one of the most advanced planes known to man. “So do you have a call sign already then? What is it?”

“…Brokeback,” Shiro admitted reluctantly.

“Oh,” Bradley said again. She didn’t seem to get the reference. “So you…um, break a lot of bones?”

“Figuratively speaking,” Dani whispered loudly.

“He fucking _wishes_ ,” Adam started laughing so hard he almost fell off the crates he was climbing down from.

“No, he came out to a bar full of Country fans wearing a cowboy hat some dude he got drunk with let him borrow,” Val told Bradley. “I don’t remember a lot about that night, but I remember that. And him falling off the mechanical bull.”

“He broke his back falling off a mechanical bull?” Bradley asked, her eyes widening.

Shiro had to throw an arm around Adam and pull him down into a headlock as soon as he saw his mouth open. Val stared at Bradley for a moment, then her eyes narrowed as she tried to comprehend what had just come out of the other woman’s mouth.

“I realize now that my wording may have confused you,” Val said after a moment.

“Val’s call sign is Sandman,” Shiro interrupted whatever else she was going to say. He did not need his sign explained any further to someone he hoped he would never have to see again after these five days were over. “Dani’s is Diesel.”

He didn’t bother to go on. Bradley was completely uninterested in anything to do with the other two women. Shiro got the sinking feeling she was one of those “not like the other girls” women, the ones who thought they were something special and that all other women were vapid and brainless. If that was the case he definitely couldn’t have her on his team, his people were the absolute best and it bothered him that anyone would look down on any of them for any reason.

“All right, planes,” he ordered.

He wanted to be rid of Bradley as soon as possible, but he still escorted her over to the plane she would be using so she could get a look at it.

“Oh, you have two-seater models,” she noted. “At the other base we only had the single-seaters.”

“We’re all trained for partner combat here,” Shiro answered, glancing up at the plane. “Mostly we fly single pilot, but if the brass ever decide they want to really pull out all the stops we all have flight partners. I specialize in the risky flying, my partner specializes in weapon systems and navigation. Two people can pull off a lot more impressive stuff that one.”

“Who’s your partner?”

“He’s—”

Shiro glanced over to the next plane, where Adam was currently balancing Val precariously on his shoulders while Dani danced around behind them to catch her if she fell, so Val could try to climb into her plane without waiting for the ladder to be brought out.

“…he’s out sick today,” Shiro answered.

* * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

As far as Curtis could tell, Kuro felt no fear. Maybe it was just that he was used to strange things and places, while this was only Curtis’ second trip away from his own solar system after the whole Arus fiasco. Shiro and Matt seemed to have the same indifference to the unfamiliar, and they’d both spent ample time out in space. Maybe eventually Curtis wouldn’t feel the borderline panic he was currently suffering from once he’d spent more time on extended expeditions.

For now though, he wasn’t feeling so great.

The cruiser was dark when they came inside, and the small light up in the corner of his helmet screen indicated that air pressure and oxygen levels still weren’t at survivable levels even after the airlocks were closed back up. There was a faint glow from the floor, some kind of guidance lights that remained on even when no other lights were.

“The life support system isn’t on,” Kuro noted, pulling out a small flashlight as Curtis turned on the light on his helmet. “Cabin isn’t properly pressurized. The atmosphere in here isn’t exactly optimal for teleporting into.”

Curtis was still sweeping the dark room as Kuro walked away, strolling deeper into the ship. He hurried to catch up, the whole situation making his skin crawl.

“There’s something wrong here,” Curtis said after a moment, running his hand along the wall. The texture was rough, bubbled, and he picked away a small piece of the cracked metal. In the light of his helmet it looked rusted or corroded. “I saw this cruiser around a week ago, it’s the one that picked Lance up from the Atlas. It was fine then, now it looks like a ghost ship.”

“The whole surface is like that,” Kuro answered, stopping to aim his flashlight at the wall of the narrow hallway, sweeping it slowly up across the ceiling and down the other side. “If it was fine a week ago, something’s either aging the material at an insane rate or putting it under more stress than it was made to withstand.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of stress,” Curtis answered. The metal was practically flaking away, completely weakened in a way he had never seen. Looking around the hall as they continued on, he was reminded of photos of old, abandoned places back on Earth, where the world had begun to reclaim the left-behind relics of concrete and steel. “Kuro, slow down.”

He caught Kuro by the arm to stop him from getting too far ahead, pulling him back a little and forcing him to slow his pace. The scans hadn’t picked up any life signs on here but Curtis was still very uncomfortable, the whole situation just screamed to him that something wasn’t right.

“We need to see what’s going on here,” Kuro insisted.

“And we will,” Curtis promised, pulling him back a little further and stepping in front of him. “Just…calm down.”

Curtis readied his weapon and crept quickly forward, moving in silence as he swept each narrow room they passed on the darkened ship. He bypassed one locked door but Kuro stopped him with a soft hiss, grabbing his arm and pulling him back. Kuro pointed to the door, lightly tapping the plaque with its Altean writing.

“This looks like Lotor’s lab,” Kuro whispered softly. “I know he had a small one he used while he traveled, this is his name on this plaque.”

“You read Altean?”

“And Galran, yeah. I think this was Lotor’s ship at some point, Honerva must have claimed it when she broke away from the Empire so she’d have privacy she wouldn’t get on a Galra ship.”

“Power’s off, we’re going to have to force it open,” Curtis pointed out. He tried, and he felt the thing give a little, but he couldn’t get it to move. “It’s not locked, but it’s tough.”

“Here, let me try,” Kuro whispered, passing his gun to Curtis.

Curtis moved out of the way, doubting Kuro would be able to do much. He was very surprised when Kuro braced himself and pulled, slowly sliding the door open until he got it far enough for them to get through. He finished and stepped back, rubbing his hands together as if to soothe the feeling of the door’s edge digging into his fingers.

“How freaking strong are you?” Curtis marveled.

“I have no idea,” Kuro smiled, his messy hair making him look far more adorable than necessary. “If we all live through this, maybe I’ll try to bench press you and see.”

Curtis passed Kuro his gun back and stepped into the lab first, flattening himself against the wall as Kuro shone his light around the room from the hall. The paths of their lights crossed and stopped at the same time, settling on the same spot across the room as the two of them stared in shock.

“What in the world is that?” Curtis blurted out, forgetting to whisper.

Kuro came into the room and they both moved toward the far side, stopping in front of two big tubes. They looked like they may have once been healing pods, but there was no healing the people in them now.

“They’re definitely dead,” Kuro confirmed Curtis’ suspicion, shining his light into each tube in turn. “Desiccated but not decayed. One female, one male. I’d put them in their early twenties, and both have marks. Alteans. Those are druid robes.”

“Is that mask part of it?” Curtis asked, nodding to the strange, bird-like masks with designs that looked like five eyes. They were resting on top of the bodies’ heads, as if ready to be pulled down. “What is it, some kind of cult?”

“Yeah, the mask is so only other druids know what their faces look like. They were Honerva’s inner circle back when she went by the name Haggar, but for a while there it seemed like they’d all died off. She must have recruited a few of the Alteans to make a new generation, but maybe something went wrong and they died in the process.”

“So she just kept them?” Curtis asked. That didn’t sound right either. “I just want to say right now that I really don’t like this.”

Curtis had long since learned to trust his instincts, especially in cases of danger. Everything he’d come across in this whole Honerva debacle so far had been convoluted and confusing, nothing had been straightforward. And his instincts were telling him that there was probably nothing simple about the two bodies here either.

He borrowed Kuro’s flashlight and began inspecting the tubes top to bottom. Then he checked behind them, looking at every fastening and every connection. What he found was definitely strange.

“There’s no corrosion here,” he murmured from where he was crouching down, looking back behind. He touched the glass. “But they’re cold. Colder than the rest of the room, even though there’s no power going to them. I’m not a genius like everyone else, but that tells me that something inside is either absorbing heat or radiating cold.”

He heard a thump, and Kuro let out a small cry of surprise and jumped back. Curtis surged to his feet, aiming the flashlight toward the body inside, but that wasn’t what had caused the disturbance.

There was something black inside, like an oily cloud, drifting around at about eye level where it had lunged at the glass. It moved like it was alive, seeming to focus in on Kuro and ignore Curtis entirely.

“What is that thing?” Curtis breathed.

“I don’t know, I've never seen anything like it,” Kuro answered. He moved from side to side curiously, and the cloud followed his movements. “I feel like it sees me.”

The cloud did appear to be paying strict attention to Kuro. It continued to move along with him, at some points pulling back and circling around to dart forward and slam against the glass again, repeating the sound that had initially caught his attention in the first place. After a few moments of this, Kuro stepped forward and reached up to put a hand on the glass. Curtis grabbed his wrist just before his fingers brushed the surface, stopping him.

“Don’t touch that,” he warned.

“Why? It’s just a little thing,” Kuro pointed out. “It doesn’t look very dangerous, it doesn’t even have teeth.”

“…it’s in a tube with a _corpse_ ,” Curtis couldn’t believe he had to explain this. “If you’d ever seen a horror movie in your life you’d know that means it’s dangerous. And you know when unidentifiable things are at their most dangerous?”

“No?”

“ _When you touch them_. Don’t touch it.”

The lights flickered on in the lab suddenly, surprising them both, and Curtis felt a vibration under his feet as the engines started up. They were beginning to move, Honerva must have activated some kind of auto-start on the ship. He looked around, listening to try and hear if Honerva had returned.

“Um, Curtis,” Kuro smacked his arm a few times, calling his attention back to the tubes. “Curtis. Curtis. Curt— _Curtis_!”

“What?” Curtis asked irritably, following Kuro’s gaze. His mood immediately changed when he saw what the other man was staring at.

Black clouds in both tubes were beginning to circle around the two bodies. They disappeared inside, slipping in through the nose and mouth, and the two very obvious corpses started to move. Curtis watched, frozen in shock, as the dried out skin filled out and smoothed over, until he was looking at what appeared to be two living, healthy Alteans.

Their eyes snapped open, showing solid black.

“Okay, now that’s probably bad news,” Kuro frowned. Curtis grabbed him and shoved him across the lab.

“Run,” he commanded, forcing him out the door. When Kuro didn’t move fast enough for his liking, Curtis grabbed his hand and took off, dragging him along. “Run run run run run!”

Lights were beginning to come on throughout the ship, but not all of them. Some had burned out and hadn’t been replaced, some were just broken. Still others flickered as they ran past, making the entire thing all the more terrifying. They reached the bridge and slammed the door closed, Kuro leaning up against it while Curtis darted over to one of the control consoles to try and find a way to lock it.

“Nothing’s working, everything is locked down,” he murmured, trying a second and third time. “Do you know any of Lotor’s access cod—”

“Kilo-Oscar-Victor-Alpha! Kilo-Oscar-Victor-Alpha!” Kuro exclaimed as something hit the door from behind, almost forcing it open before he dug in his heels and pushed back. “KILO-OSCAR-VICTOR-ALPHA!”

“I heard you the first two times but WHAT IS THAT IN ALTEAN!?” Curtis half-shouted back in a panic.

“If you can’t read Altean, how do you even know it’s locked down!?” Kuro demanded.

“Because nothing’s happening!” Curtis snapped, demonstrating by slamming the buttons on the console and touchscreens. “See the buttons light up? See nothing happening? See the four spaces here in the middle where it’s waiting for an access code?”

The door was slammed from the other side again, hard enough to push Kuro forward slightly. He scrambled to push back, barely getting it closed again.

“Circle with line through it!” He directed, starting to panic as well. “Squiggly thing! Extended square!”

“What the hell is an extended square?”

“To your left!” Kuro yelled. “Further! Further! More! That one!”

“That’s a fucking rectangle!” Curtis had long since lost his cool, and he was now beginning to think that if those druids didn’t murder Kuro he would do it for them.

“Circle with line, squiggly thing, _rectangle_ , sort-of-moon-shape with an X through it!”

Curtis hit the last button for the code and the console booted up. Since the Atlas was based on Altean tech he didn’t really need to be completely familiar with the interface, he just needed to be familiar with where to look. After two brief tries he found the right command, and the door locks engaged heavily behind them to seal them into the cockpit.

Kuro spun around and backed away from the door, only stopping when his legs hit the console next to Curtis. The druids out in the hallway were really pounding on it now, the sounds echoing ominously through the bridge until, suddenly, they stopped.

Everything went silent, and for a moment all Curtis could hear was his pounding heart.

“Do you think they went away?” Kuro whispered.

There was something odd about the door. It seemed to be getting lighter, and it took the span of a few breaths for Curtis to realize its surface was developing a layer of frost.

“No, I don’t think they went away.”

The frost spread quickly, covering the door and then the frame around it. Curtis felt the temperature in the air around them drop, the edges of his helmet screen starting to fog up. The door took another blow from outside and shattered, falling to the ground in small, flash-frozen chunks, and the two druids standing there looked immediately at Kuro.

Curtis grabbed his hand again and jumped over the console, pulling him along and moving all the way to the front of the bridge. He shoved Kuro back against the wall to hopefully avoid hitting him with any possible ricochet and leveled his gun at the two Alteans.

Their eyes weren’t black anymore, they just looked like a couple of normal kids. But instead of reacting, the boy started gathering a ball of purple light in his hands and taking aim back at them. There was nowhere to go, all they could do was tense as it came at them and hope it didn’t hurt too much.

Curtis heard a soft pop sound, then felt something soft brushing against him. A quick burst of cold and then suddenly there was nothing under his feet; he and Kuro fell into a heap on the floor of the Blue Lion’s cargo hold.

He fought his helmet off, sucking in the properly conditioned air. Kuro was pulling off his own helmet next to him, and a gray animal that looked a lot like Kosmo sat in front of them. Curtis had never traveled like that before, but he’d heard about and seen enough of Kosmo’s tricks that he had a pretty good idea of what had just happened.

“Is this one yours?” He asked, feeling a flood of relief as he realized they were safe for the moment.

“Uh, no,” Kuro answered, scrambling to his feet. “I think I’m hers. But I’ve had worse owners, so I’m not going to complain!”

He climbed over Curtis without so much as a warning, very nearly kicking him in the face as he made a grab for the small metal case he had been carrying with him when they’d met and ran for the door.

“Come on, they’re going to need all the help they can get!”

* * * * *

_**Years Ago**_ :

“This is a bad idea, Shiro.”

Adam was leaning back against his plane, arms crossed, looking over Shiro’s shoulder at the new arrival while pretending he wasn’t actually looking at her. He wasn’t happy about this, but he was being unusually tactful. Shiro was glad, since anything that got thrown at Theresa Bradley would likely end up reaching her father’s ear and might get Shiro in trouble.

“She’s more interested in flirting with you and looking good than flying, this isn’t going to work out.”

Shiro was standing in front of him, leaning against the plane with one hand next to Adam’s head. This should have been a routine flight practice with his unit, he should have been here fantasizing about shoving Adam back against this plane instead of worrying about what kind of unmitigated disaster was probably waiting for them in the air. He turned his head slightly as if looking over at Val’s plane, sneaking a brief glance back at Bradley.

“I know,” he sighed. “That’s why I’m going to change up the flight positions today. I need you on her tail.”

“Wait, me? No,” Adam said immediately. “Absolutely not. She’s your problem, Shiro. You’re not going to make her my problem.”

“Adam,” Shiro added a bit of a whine to his voice. “Come on.”

“No.”

“Ōkami.”

“Shiro.”

“Ōkako,” Shiro cajoled, giving cute a try.

“Takashi,” Adam matched his brazen tease, unwilling to lose this battle.

It shouldn’t have had any real effect, it was just his name. He had lived in he United States long enough that plenty of people had called him by his first name before he’d corrected them and allowed them to call him Shiro instead. Even Adam had called him Takashi once before, intentionally violating his cultural norm to pick a fight.

It had made him angry back then. But this time was different.

This time Adam said it quietly, keeping his use of it between the two of them. There was a slight hitch to his voice in the middle of it as he stumbled over it a little, uncertain even as it came out of his mouth whether he had made a mistake and pushed too far. There was something almost intimate about it, like he was pushing a boundary but genuinely cared if he crossed a line, not a consideration Adam usually gave other people.

Adam knew that first names were only used when people were close, but Shiro doubted he really understood some of the connotations. Nobody had called him Takashi except his close family, even less familiar relatives and close friends had only ever called him Shiro.

Hearing it come out of Adam’s mouth was almost a birthday gift in and of itself. Shiro hadn’t expected to like the sound of it so much, he actually found himself looking away to try and fight down the flush he felt creeping up his neck.

Adam was smart enough to sense something was off, even if he didn’t know what. When Shiro looked back at him he looked almost embarrassed, another extreme rarity for a man who had no shame.

They were definitely in a weird place.

“I have to lead the maneuvers,” Shiro powered on, not commenting. Adam was a little confused by getting a free pass when anyone else would have been corrected immediately, but Shiro pretended not to notice. “I just need somebody else to keep eyes on her. She seems like a showboater, I can’t focus on her and watch everyone else at the same time. Please? I’ll do anything.”

“Anything?” Adam raised an eyebrow. Shiro knew immediately he was in trouble, but he really needed his partner’s help here today. He didn’t trust Val or Dani to not just shoot Bradley out of the air and pretend it was an accident.

“Anything.”

Adam considered it, and finally relented.

“Fine. Move me back in formation for the week. Consider it a birthday present.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current Day**_ :

Shiro ducked a kick aimed at his head and grabbed Honerva’s ankle, dipping under her leg to spin around face away from her. He prepared to use the new position to throw her forward, but felt her tense in preparation.

Honerva had so far only fought them physically, she hadn’t used any of her magic. Shiro had to assume that meant Adam had been successful in hitting her with Lotor’s serum, and that the serum had actually worked. But there was no telling how long it was going to work, and they were still getting their asses handed to them.

She was holding her own against all three of them, and the main reason for that was that they were all predictable. Matt and Bandor were trained in very specific ways with their staves, and Honerva had faced Shiro before. If they were going to have a chance, Shiro knew he was going to have to start being unpredictable.

Instead of throwing her, Shiro reached up to grip her ankle with both hands and did a sideways flip, hanging on tight and using his weight and momentum to twist her whole leg in an attempt to wrench her hip out of its socket. He felt something crack, the first real success of this battle so far, and she went down with her leg bent at an odd angle.

Shiro landed in a crouch, taking a second to catch his breath and survey the situation. Bandor and Matt were a few yards away, groaning and getting up from where they’d been thrown. Far behind them the Blue Lion had settled at the edge of the plateau, and he could see Kuro sprinting away from it toward Adam with Curtis at his heels.

“Change of plans!” Kuro yelled as he passed. “No ship stealing today! Scary crazy lady has even scarier haunted corpses!”

“He’s not joking, sir!” Curtis added on his way by. “Freaky shit, incoming!”

As if Shiro really needed the situation to get worse, there was a dark flicker behind Bandor and Matt. Two of Honerva’s druids appeared, and they looked fully prepared to use the magic she couldn’t.

“Watch out!” He shouted, motioning for them to be careful. “Get out of the way!”

Bandor and Matt didn’t need to be told twice, they spit up and started running to put distance between themselves and the new arrivals. A cracking sound brought Shiro back to his own predicament as Honerva jumped up to her feet, her leg snapping back into normal position as if nothing had ever happened.

“What the hell?” Shiro breathed.

She was moving like he hadn’t even given her a bruise, a wicked smirk curving her lips when she looked over and saw that Kuro had arrived.

“I suppose he did bring you both to me, in a way,” Honerva simpered, bringing a hand to her hip. There was a small flash as she drew a sword from seemingly out of nowhere, the same way they had always drawn their bayards. It was a broadsword similar to the one they’d seen Lance use, with a dark purple blade. “Maybe I’ll let him have a slightly bigger cage.”

She came at him fast, faster than she’d moved the whole time. As Shiro danced back out of the way he realized she had just been playing with them, biding her time until she knew if anyone else was near. Now that she had both Shiro and Kuro, she was finished with her games. The only thing they had on their side was the idea that maybe she would want the two of them alive, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t kill the others.

He blocked a downward swipe of the sword and caught it in the curves of his crescent, only barely prepared for the force of it thanks to Keith’s description of the weight of Lance’s blade. A twist of his hands locked their weapons together, giving him a few precious seconds to get an idea of where everyone was.

Matt was trying to engage one of the druids, but their ability to blink in and out was making it difficult for him. Bandor had realized he was no match and was doing the smart thing, pretty much just constantly moving and keeping himself from becoming a target. Kuro was on his knees next to Adam, slamming a syringe of something into him and then throwing it aside to pull another out of the little case he had. Curtis was kneeling on Adam’s other side, swiping away blood wherever he could to try and find any injuries that needed to be treated.

He was alive, then. They wouldn’t be bothering if he wasn’t.

Shiro gave Honerva’s sword a sharp push upward, summoning the crescent away from his right hand and down to his left. While both of her arms were still pulled up holding the sword he rammed the blade into the section of her armor that was already slashed, feeling it sink into flesh and hoping he had gotten whatever injury she already had. He gripped it with both hands and pulled upward as hard as he could, trying to slice her open as badly as possible.

It hurt her, there was no question, but it didn’t stop her. And now she had an idea that he could grab and slow her weapon with his, and the element of surprise on that front was gone.

Shiro jumped back as Honerva came forward swinging, parrying where he could and otherwise trying to stay out of the way. He timed her swings and watched the pattern, and when she came in with an upward sweep he ran forward. Sliding under the sword, he made another slash at her midsection even as he felt the blade come close enough to brush his hair.

Honerva dropped the sword so its weight wouldn’t hinder her from making a quick adjustment, jumping and rolling forward over Shiro’s swing and avoiding it altogether. She came up on her knees with a large knife she’d grabbed off the ground from behind him, covered in blood and probably used in her fight with Adam. She sent it flying across the plateau, toward where the other two were trying to help Adam.

“Curtis!”

Shiro did his best to try and warn them, but Curtis’ back was to them. Shiro was certain they were about to lose their first soldier in this fight.

Kuro moved suddenly from where he was kneeling in front of Curtis, still leaning over Adam. He straightened up, reaching up and around with one hand to grab the knife out of the air just before it struck. Tossing it up again for Curtis to catch, he twisted and leaned around the other side to more easily pull up the gun that was still slung across his chest and start firing.

Honerva was just getting to her feet when the shots hit, sending her stumbling backwards. Shiro dropped down behind her to avoid being hit himself, slamming his crescent into the back of one of her knees and causing her to fall back over him.

Even then, she started to get up. Nothing they were doing was having any kind of affect at all, she just put herself back together.

Kuro was up on one knee now, continuing to fire his weapon with what should have been deadly accuracy. Curtis was right behind him, firing over his head and helping to provide cover. They hit Honerva in all the right spots making her jerk and slowing her down but not stopping her. All they were doing was making themselves priority targets.

Shiro started to get up to go after her but he was hit so hard he saw stars as he slammed into the ground and rolled several yards, stupidly forgetting to keep an eye on the two druids. As his fuzzy vision started to clear he lifted his head to find Matt lying face down across the plateau, and Bandor trying to defend him from the druid that wasn’t coming at Shiro.

There was a static on the air as well, as Honerva started drawing energy for an attack of her own. Lotor’s serum wasn’t meant to dampen someone with abilities like hers, she was fighting it off.

Shiro looked around for something he could do. He was pinned down by the approaching druid with no shelter, half of his body still tingling from the hit he’d taken. Matt was still down and Bandor didn’t stand a chance, and Kuro and Curtis were having no luck.

_There has to be something_ , he thought desperately, gripping his bayard and preparing to push himself up as anger started to seep in. He would have to brave getting hit again, there really was no option. He had to reach her, he had to do something to take her down. _I’m not letting her near him again, she’s not taking any of us with her. She’s NOT._

Shiro launched himself up to his feet and started running. He didn’t really have a plan, he just intended to throw himself into Honerva and maybe distract her long enough for Curtis and Kuro to regroup. He had nothing he could do except survive any further hits from her druids and bring her down to protect everyone else for just a few minutes more, give them a chance to get back into Blue and call in the Atlas for backup.

He’d just about reached her when everything around him came to a screeching halt, the world suspended in glowing white. Shiro had experienced this once before, six months ago on the Atlas, that feeling of not being completely alone in his own head. There was something else here with him, trying to tell him what to do if he’d listen long enough to understand.

It was fast, barely the blink of an eye. A single instant when everything around him was laid out like a glowing blueprint, everyone was reduced to their most basic elements. The world under his feet laid out in the swirls of its invisible quintessence, the people nearby mapped by the veins of life running through their forms.

There were dark spots, three of them, marring the visual like gaping wounds. Two were vaguely shaped clouds moving in his peripheral vision but it was the third one he focused on. The ball of darkness that seemed settled behind Honerva’s heart, spidering out into the rest of her body and limbs. It was something that was there but wasn’t, a thing that was latched on and letting her draw power from it to make herself practically invincible.

The visual flickered across his gaze and then was gone, but Shiro got the message. He tightened his grip on his bayard and twisted as he reached Honerva, whipping the blade around to slam it into the back of the reinforced armor she wore to protect whatever the thing connected to her was.

The crescent’s blade hit, slamming into the space between her shoulder blades and cracking the armor. He saw blood, knew he’d pierced the skin, but he also knew there was no way he’d killed her. The blow was too shallow, she was too well protected.

Honerva let out a scream of rage, wrenching away as Shiro tried to press the blade in further. She spun around and started backing away, pissed that he knew where to hit her and no longer willing to turn her back. She let loose the energy she’d been building up, throwing it at Shiro at point blank range instead, leaving him no time to duck out of the way.

He felt something heavy hit him, a brief flash of cold, and then he was standing halfway across the plateau. The ground started to vibrate under them as Blue began preparing to take off, and then before Shiro knew what was going on Hoshi teleported him again.

This time when his vision cleared he was in Blue’s cockpit. Matt was already there, leaning heavily against the console to support himself, blood running down the side of his face from a cut at his hairline.

“We’re all here!” Matt exclaimed when he saw Shiro. He was holding the helmet that had been stupidly left behind earlier, their only connection to Blue’s comms. “Now, Coran! We need that wormhole now!”

Blue was already rising, but through the viewscreen Shiro could see the cruiser starting to turn in their direction. Honerva had undoubtedly boarded as soon as they were all out of her immediate reach. They had been pitted against this cruiser before, and Shiro already knew it could pack one hell of a punch.

Blue’s scanners showed the cruiser getting ready to fire its main cannon just as they passed out of the upper atmosphere, to where a wormhole was flashing open. Shiro leaned over the pilot’s seat and slammed her accelerator up to full blast, mentally urging her on faster. They had almost reached it when everything shook, the world turning upside down as the cannon blast hit them on their way through.

The Blue Lion tumbled out of the other side of the wormhole, falling into complete darkness as her power died and everything shut down. Everything fell quiet, and Shiro waited for a few seconds to make sure they had indeed made it through and weren’t about to be hit again. He carefully pushed himself up, looking over to where Matt was climbing weakly up off the floor.

“What the hell was that?” Matt demanded.

“She’s souped up its weapons,” Shiro answered, his legs feeling shaky as he got up completely. Half of his body still felt numb from that druid’s blast. “That was the same weapon that mech used against us after the Last Stand. Thank god that wormhole opened or we’d probably be dead right now.”

He started to leave the cockpit, but then everything went completely silent. The soft hum of Blue’s backup systems, usually barely noticeable, now went completely off. Shiro found himself beginning to float above the floor as the gravity simulator died.

“Everybody, helmets on!” He called, flipping on his flashlight as he joined the others in Blue’s hold. “Life support’s down! Is everyone all right? Somebody get me a head count!”

“We’ve got everyone,” Curtis called from across the hold. “No extra helmet for Adam or the wolf, though.”

“They should be okay,” Shiro answered, pushing off the wall to join the small group of flickering lights. “The Atlas will notice our power out and pull us in soon enough. Two breathers won’t use up all of the oxygen before then.”

“Well, one good thing about no gravity,” Kuro said softly. “No pressure on his insides for the moment.”

Shiro finally reached where the others were gathered together. Curtis was behind Adam, holding him lightly under his arms to keep him steady. Bandor was holding a flashlight, and Kuro was pressing around on different places of Adam’s body. Everyone was covered with blood at this point, it was like a horror movie scene.

He lightly nudged Curtis away without asking permission, putting one hand under Adam’s back and draping the other arm under his chin. Shiro rested his own chin on top of Adam’s head, holding him as close as he could while still letting Kuro work.

He was breathing, Shiro could feel that. Faint, weak, but there.

It was almost impossible to believe, that they were finally here. That he had Adam back, that he was holding him in his arms. Shiro was acutely aware that they weren’t out of the woods just yet, but they were so, so close.

“There are no external injuries,” Kuro said finally. “None of this blood is his.”

“None of it?” Matt asked in disbelief, having finally made his own way over. “How is that even possible? That whole cliff looked like somebody’s insides exploded all over it, if none of it was his then whose was it?”

“I’m going to bet it was the psycho we shot about three thousand times but couldn’t bring down,” Curtis hazarded a guess. “Shiro hit her plenty of times with that blade too, she barely blinked.”

Shiro didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to talk about anything right now, he just wanted to have a quiet moment. Kuro drew the small case he’d had back out of his pocket, opening it and taking out another one of the syringes he’d seen him using earlier.

“Is that the stuff you said you were trying to make for him?” Curtis asked. “Are you going to give him all of it at once?”

“Yes,” Kuro injected one, then returned it to the case and took the next. “He needs a healing pod…I’m assuming there’s one on your ship? The pods stimulate healing by making all of the systems start working correctly. But they can’t do that with him, they can’t force his body to make something it’s not programmed to make. Without it, they can’t do their job. So I’m going to load him up before he goes in. With the time difference, if he’s out here while the luferin’s being produced in the Abyss, I’ll have plenty ready for normal daily doses in about two days or so. Bandor?”

Bandor was being very quiet, but he didn’t look shaken. He looked pensive, like someone who had seen plenty of death already and didn’t like having to potentially see it again. He glanced up, shaken out of his reverie.

“Yes?”

“Can you heal? Even a little?”

“A little,” Bandor answered. “Basic first aid. I’m not really on Keela’s level.”

“That’s fine, every little bit helps.” Kuro took the flashlight and moved over to the side, taking one of Bandor’s hands and resting it on Adam’s chest.

“I just need you to focus on his heart right now, okay? You don’t need to completely fix it, it just needs a little bit of help. Then we’ll move on to his lungs.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years Ago**_ :

“She’s a sloppy flyer, I don’t think she’s ever been in a formation outside of a simulator before.”

Adam’s voice drifted quietly over a private frequency, calm and controlled. Shiro could tell he was becoming frustrated, but with as easy as it was to make him explode Adam could have the patience of a saint when it really mattered.

“I know, I keep seeing her drift on my scanners,” Shiro answered, glancing down at his instrument panel. “I’m kind of pissed. I was told she made pilot status six months ago, the only way she could be this bad is if she’s been on reserve all this time.”

“Well it would be nice if her talk matched her skills,” Adam grumbled. “She hasn’t shut her damn mouth since we took off. I think Sandman’s been pressing a middle finger against her canopy glass for the last ten minutes hoping Bradley will notice and shut up.”

Shiro couldn’t see behind him, but he didn’t doubt that could be the case. Neither of the two women in the unit had said much since they’d taken off, likely not trusting themselves to be polite. Bradley was filling the silence all on her own though, talking about all the things she could do. He was starting to suspect Adam was right though, that most of those things had been done in a simulator.

“Am I going to get punished for this?” Shiro asked, grinning slightly. “Will I not get to go out to dinner tonight?”

“Oh, you’re definitely going to be punished, you should’ve thought long and hard before you told me you’d do anything. But we’re still going to dinner. I’ll even let you pick the place since it’s supposed to be your ‘special day’ or whatever.”

“Can it be somewhere that requires chopsticks?” Shiro asked, smiling wider when Adam groaned. He couldn’t get the hang of using chopsticks, and it was always funny to watch him try.

“I guess,” Adam relented. “But I’m bringing my own goddamn fork.”

Shiro chuckled and turned down the private frequency, letting his attention go back to the main line. Bradley was still going, even though she’d been cut off and told to stop with the personal stories several times. She seemed to think this was a book club meeting or something and not a military unit.

“Okay, we’ve been across the map,” Shiro interrupted her, bringing up his map and sending a route out to the other four planes. “I’m sure Bradley paid very close attention to everything we passed, since that’s what a trained fighter pilot would do. We’re going to practice theta.

“Bradley, theta is a maneuver we call “the wall.” It’s a vertical X formation, it’s for going after targets that are at varying heights. Sandman, I want you on top right, Diesel, you on bottom right. Bradley, you’re top left, Gucci, you’re bottom right.

“Isn’t the lower position the one with more obstacles?” Bradley asked. “It’s closer to the ground, right? Can’t I take that position? I’m a very strong flyer.”

“I assure you, Gucci is a pretty decent flyer himself,” Shiro said dryly. He didn’t have to see Adam to know he was probably grinding his teeth. “He’s well-practiced in this, you…aren’t. I can already tell you aren’t. Dodging obstacles in a simulator is very different from low flying at high speed in real life.”

“I’m not going to be able to show you what I can do if you don’t let me, you know,” Bradley huffed.

“I don’t care what you can do, I care if you can follow orders,” Shiro said sharply, losing patience. “I’m not your father, I don’t love you. I don’t care about your feelings. Do what I tell you to do, or go land your plane and go home.”

There was a moment of blissful silence. Shiro didn’t like to be that way, and usually he didn’t have to be. His people were disciplined pilots and they obeyed orders, they knew where to draw the line between friend and superior officer. Bradley wasn’t a soldier, she just wanted to be able to tell people she was one without doing the work.

“Fine,” she snapped. Shiro saw her plane peel off the group.

_Oh no she isn’t actually going back to the hangar. There is no fucking way an adult military pilot just did that._

Shiro banked his plane to the right, pulling into a circle so he could watch her as she dropped away. She paid absolutely no attention to where anyone else was, and Adam was obediently moving into position down below. He didn’t see Bradley, who was quickly dropping to a very low altitude; probably so she could spitefully show off these piloting skills she allegedly had.

“Bradley, you have Gucci right below you, pull up!” Shiro warned. “Adam, watch out!”

“Fuck!” He heard Adam hiss, his plane jerking into a barrel roll to the right just in time to avoid getting slammed into by Bradley.

But the action was costly. She had penned him in with her position, and as he evened back out his right wing hit a rock formation head on.

“Gucci!” Shiro heard Val and Dani screaming and knew he wasn’t the only one who had banked to watch Bradley go. He couldn’t get his own mouth to work, couldn’t really believe what he was seeing.

Adam’s wing sheered completely off and the plane spun in the air, too low for him to eject before he lost most of his altitude. Uncontrollable, the plane hit the ground tail-first, which flipped it over upside down and sent it skidding canopy-down across the rocky desert ground before it came to a stop just short of going over the edge of a canyon. The ground was littered with pieces and parts, the remains of the plane a crumpled heap.

“Gucci!” Shiro finally made himself move, turning up the volume on his channels. “Ōkako, do you copy? Come in.”

_Please answer. Please, please answer._

“Control, this is Brokeback, we have a pilot down. Repeat, Gucci is down,” Shiro felt like it was somebody else speaking as he continued to circle the wreckage below, searching for some sign, any sign, that Adam was okay. “Request Medevac immediately at current coordinates. Low-altitude crash, plane is upside down. Current temperature out here is twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, no wind shelter. Wreckage is smoking, no visible flames. Pilot may need mechanical extraction.”

_Come on Adam, say something. Please be okay. Please answer me._

“Copy, Brokeback. Medevac is being dispatched. Return to base.”

“The rest of the unit will return to base,” Shiro answered. “I’ll stay and keep an eye on things until Medevac arrives.”

There was a pause while Shiro waited for confirmation.

“Negative, Brokeback. Per Commander Iverson, return to base immediately.”

Shiro wanted to argue. He wanted to fight them on this. He wanted to stay here, to make sure Adam got help. He didn’t want to head back and leave him down below in the desert alone for however long it took the helicopter to get here. It was freezing out here, and Adam hated the cold…

“Roger that, Control,” Shiro answered through clenched teeth. Everyone knew what they were doing, he had to get out of the way and let them do their jobs. “Unit returning to base. Diesel, Sandman, Bradley, back to the hangar.”

He didn’t know how he made it back, everything was a blur. His hands ached by the time he landed from gripping his controls so hard. He barely remembered coming in to land, or taxiing his plane into the hangar to disembark. It wasn’t until his feet were on the hangar floor that he snapped back into reality, and that was to hone in immediately on Bradley.

Shiro started across the hangar, not really having any idea what he was going to do once he caught up to her. Beat her into the ground, maybe. Break her neck. Hand her back over to Daddy Dearest in pieces. He just wanted to get his hands on her, give her exactly what she deserved.

He was halfway there when Dani grabbed him from behind, making him stumble and slowing him down. Val shot past him, getting to Bradley first and tackling her to the hangar floor, starting to pummel her with her fists. She was screaming an angry tirade in Greek, and Shiro didn’t need to understand the words to understand the underlying rage.

Three nearby airmen came running to break up the fight, all three of them necessary to pull Val off of Bradley. Dani wouldn’t let Shiro go, keeping him entangled and held back until the worst of the fight was over and both women were being escorted away at a superior officer’s orders.

Someone was telling him that Iverson wanted to see him, but Shiro ignored the request. Both he and Dani darted out of the hangar and made the trip across the Garrison property at a run, startling cadets and teachers as they cut through the quad to reach the medical ward. They had to go through the building, which slowed them down quite a bit as staff stopped them from running, working through the maze of hallways to get outside to the landing field.

The Medevac helicopter was just landing as they came outside, whipping up the cold air around them. Two of the soldiers working the landing field stopped them from going any further, and they were forced to watch from a distance as the paramedics climbed out.

A gurney came out after them, but the view was obstructed by one of the paramedics. Halfway to the building, three doctors came running out to meet them and started to do triage. Shiro saw one of them pulling Adam’s dog tags out of his flight suit, and knew he had to get over there.

“Excuse me,” he ducked under the arm of one of the soldiers and ran across the grass to the group, catching up to them just as they were going into the building. “Hey! _Hey!_ Excuse me!”

“You can’t come into the E.R., Captain,” one of the paramedics warned as they passed off the gurney, moving to hold him back. “I’m going to have to ask you to go ahead back to debrief your commander.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Shiro pushed past him, leaving the paramedics to follow him and try to stop him as he went after the doctors. “Ma’am! Excuse me, it’s about your patient!”

One of the doctors looked up, sighing and slowing down. She let the gurney keep going, and motioned for the paramedics to momentarily let Shiro be.

“His blood type,” Shiro panted, still out of breath from all the running. “It’s rhnull, it’s really rare. You can’t give him any other blood, you might kill him. He pays to have his own blood frozen at a clinic in the city. You have to find Dr. Lacey Hendrick, she’ll know where to get it.”

“Thank you, Captain,” the doctor nodded and started following the gurney back again. “I’ll take care of it. Now, you really can’t be coming back here. I’m sorry. We’ll let you know his condition as soon as we have specifics.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current Day:** _

Blue shook as Yellow caught her and guided her toward the Atlas airlock, where Green was waiting to help slow her before the lack of gravity made her crash. Her occupants felt nothing themselves, floating quietly in the dark and positioning themselves for the moment when they entered the larger ship’s gravity field.

Shiro gripped the edge of the bay area doorway with one hand, using the other to gently push Adam down flat against the floor so that he wouldn’t end up jarred or dropped. Kuro copied his actions on the other side, making sure they kept him steady.

Adam hadn’t moved since they’d gotten him on board. The only signs of life he even had were his breathing and pulse, both of which had improved slightly under Bandor’s efforts but were still too weak for Shiro’s liking.

They moved into the air lock, into the Atlas’ gravity, and around them everything began to settle. Shiro found himself once again able to kneel on the floor without floating, and immediately maneuvered Adam’s head off the hard floor and into his lap. He smoothed back the other man’s hair, wiping away some of the blood on his face with a gloved hand.

They were here, they were on the Atlas. But Shiro knew better than anyone that this presented its own set of threats. He had gone through so much to bring Adam this far, he wasn’t about to abandon him to a different kind of incarceration.

“Kuro…do you have anything in that pack of yours that will wake him up?” Shiro asked.

“Wake him up?” Kuro looked up at him. “Look at him, you can’t wake him up. I mean…I have some stimulants that might make him seem awake, but he’s not going to be coherent or clear.”

“That will have to do,” Shiro answered. He looked up at Curtis and Matt. “This is going to sound absolutely insane, but I need to get married.”

There was a pause while they absorbed that.

“Okay, you’re not wrong,” Curtis said finally. “You do sound absolutely insane. Which I don’t think will help you when you’re facing whatever crazy charges you get for manipulating a marriage to someone who can’t consent.”

“He won’t file charges, he’ll just go for a divorce.”

“Hi, have you met this man?” Kuro asked, looking at him. “He won’t file for a divorce. He won’t have to, because all of our dead bodies will be dumped in the same ditch once he’s done making himself a widower.”

“Hey, intergalactic Steve Irwin?” Curtis answered. “Is that nervousness I hear from the guy who wanted to pet the evil ink monster in the obviously haunted space ship? Although,” he looked back to Shiro, “he does have a slight point about Adam’s temper.”

“Guys, listen to me,” Shiro motioned for them all to be quiet. “Once he’s out of Blue and on the Atlas, he’s under Garrison jurisdiction. His eyes are Galra tech implants, that’s an automatic quarantine even Iverson can’t override. They made some changes to the rules to avoid another Colleen Holt incident, but at this point the only people who will even be allowed to know he’s alive will be immediate family and his spouse. If he doesn’t have either, he has nobody to advocate for him…that means they don’t have to listen to Kuro, Garrison doctors can do whatever treatment they want without checking with anyone.”

It was an uncomfortable truth. As officers, they knew that the quarantine was important and that it was there for a reason, and that generally speaking, it was for the good of Earth. That they were all hesitant to let that system work on its own was an awkward reminder that the system most of them championed and were complicit in some fashion wasn’t exactly perfect.

“Okay, he has a point,” Matt was the first one to speak up as the sounds of the Atlas crew trying to get Blue open from the outside started to echo in to them. “Especially with how jumpy everyone is about anything Galran.”

“Ugh,” Curtis pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he was already imagining what was going to happen to him when Adam found out he had a part in this. “All right, this is like something out of a dumb college movie, but I guess we have five minutes to plan the weirdest wedding anybody’s ever seen.”

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Years Ago**_ :

Shiro leaned against the kitchen counter, flipping through what must have been hundreds of songs in Adam’s music library. He had never realized how lifeless and empty the apartment was without his roommate, how much light and life disappeared when he wasn’t around. Adam was the heart and soul of this little corner of the world, he made it the kind of place Shiro wanted to come home to.

But he had been in the hospital for three weeks, and then hadn’t come back after his discharge. Shiro hadn’t seen him since two days after the crash, the next time he’d come in the hospital staff had informed him Adam requested he not visit.

Shiro picked a song at random and left it on, wandering into the living room to his laptop. He checked his Garrison email to see if there was anything important, feeling his stomach drop anew when he saw the old notifications there.

Adam had transferred out of his unit, Shiro had been notified of that officially two days ago. He had gone to Iverson to request the transfer, hadn’t said a word to Shiro himself. He’d been out of the hospital for five days now but hadn’t come home, had avoided the apartment and had avoided Shiro.

_What did you expect was going to happen?_ Shiro berated himself. _His best friend told him he loved him. Of course he’s going to freak out and back off._

It had been stupid. Shiro knew he had made the wrong choice even before he’d arrived at the hospital to visit. He’d known it was best to keep his mouth shut even as he’d walked into the room. He had been perfectly aware that the only outcome possible was the absolute ruin of everything they had, but he’d soldiered on anyway.

Because at the time he’d believed that if he didn’t say what he felt, he’d regret it later in life. Well, now he sure as hell was regretting opening his mouth.

_“I love you.”_

He had blurted it out while he sat on the edge of Adam’s bed. Adam had been sitting up, braced by a couple pillows, picking at the IV in his hand. He’d been bandaged and bruised, scraped and scratched. His leg was broken, badly enough that he was going to need physical therapy to get it back to 100%, and he’d had a few internal injuries.

Luckily, the crash had been at a low enough altitude that it hadn’t been an instant death sentence. The initial impact that sheered off his wing had slowed the plane down a lot, his injuries had mostly come from the plane flipping over and skidding to a stop. But even though Adam was going to be okay, the entire thing had scared Shiro more than anything in recent memory. He was shaken, and badly.

“ _Not like a friend. Well, like a friend, but also different. I’m_ in _love with you, Ōkako_. _After all this, I need to say it while I have the chance._ _I just…I love you_.”

Shiro dropped down to sit on the edge of the sofa, groaning and putting his face in his hands. He had been so inelegant, so undiplomatic. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but life was not a romance novel. He still felt the sting of humiliation even now, when he remembered Adam’s reaction to his admission. The blank stare, the dawning comprehension. The uncomfortable pause.

“ _That’s cool_ ,” Adam had said after an agonizingly long silence. “ _I mean, I love me too. High-five, dude._ ”

There had literally been a high-five. A very awkward, very uncomfortable high-five. It had been one long, extensive, domino effect disaster, starting with that exchange.

The next day he found he’d been uninvited to visit. Val and Dani had seen Adam a few times and told Shiro he was fine, but that he definitely seemed kind of bewildered and bothered by something. Shiro had waited for Adam’s discharge date, figuring he’d come around and at least get a ride home from him, but that hadn’t happened. He’d gone elsewhere, hadn’t even come home for a change of clothes.

Now the news that Adam didn’t even want to be in the same unit with him anymore, he was that upset by what Shiro had said.

Life was about to change, Shiro knew. Adam wasn’t comfortable under the same roof as him anymore, or even flying with him anymore. He would probably get assigned a new flight partner he’d have to train with, and there was no way he’d ever be as compatible with somebody else as he had been with Adam. Everything was just crashing down around him, all because he hadn’t been able to keep his mouth closed.

The sound of keys in the door was unexpected. Shiro was on his feet as the door opened to admit Adam, carrying some shopping bags that probably had the new clothes he’d bought himself over the last few days instead of coming home. His hair was pushed back out of his face by his sunglasses, and he moved with a slight limp as he shrugged off his coat and hung it on the hook by the door.

It took him a moment to notice Shiro, standing there frozen like a puppy in trouble.

“…hey,” Adam greeted, not looking at him. “It’s after midnight, I thought you’d be asleep.”

“I had some stuff to work on,” Shiro lied, glad he still had folders of paperwork laying out on the coffee table where he’d dropped them two weeks ago. “I didn’t think it would matter if I spread out a little since you were at…a hotel?”

“Um, a friend’s house?” Adam phrased it as if it were a question, visibly awkward and uncomfortable. “I had a lot of stuff to think about.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Shiro said dully. He took a deep breath, running a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“Everything,” Shiro answered. “I know everything going on with you is because of me. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s okay,” Adam moved his bags over out of the way and limped carefully to the kitchen. Shiro knew they wouldn’t have let him go like that without at least a cane, but he also knew Adam would probably rather eat glass than use an aid like that. “It was going to come out eventually, right?”

“Yeah, but it could’ve waited.” Shiro followed, leaning in the kitchen doorway to watch him go through the fridge. “Couple months. Couple years. Forever. It didn’t have to come out. Especially not when you were already going through a recovery.”

“Shiro…”

“I’m—I was—your superior officer, it wasn’t a fair position for me to put you in,” Shiro continued. “It was inappropriate. I wish you didn’t transfer, but honestly, you had every right to. I like to think I’m a fair person and that I don’t let things cloud my judgement, but everyone thinks that about themselves. You have no way of being sure that I wouldn’t get dumb about it and interfere with your job, unless I intended to recuse myself from my own position I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.”

“Shiro.”

“And I understand you not wanting to come back here,” Shiro added, so caught up in his own babbling that he didn’t really hear Adam talking. “I understand completely that it’s probably really uncomfortable for you. If you’d called I could’ve found somewhere else to go for a while so you didn’t have to go hide at a friend’s house. And I can find my own place and move out of here, but it’s going to take at least a month so I hope you’re at least okay waiting that long—”

“ _Takashi._ ”

Adam closed the fridge and crossed the small kitchen. He reached up to lightly hold Shiro’s face in both hands and leaned in, cutting off his rambling with a soft kiss. For a moment Shiro had trouble processing what was going on, his entire mental capacity came to a grinding halt and all he was aware of was that there were warm lips pressed against his own.

When Adam pulled back, he looked uncomfortable again.

“I practiced saying a lot of things to you,” Adam admitted. “That…wasn’t one of them.”

He went back to the fridge, still favoring his leg, and opened it again. Not sure why he’d even looked in there, he just grabbed himself a bottle of water and leaned back against the counter.

“I’m sorry. I know the radio silence was dumb. I was freaking out, I didn’t know what to say to you. I…don’t know when I’ll be able to get into a plane again. I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to get into a plane again. Just the thought of flying after that, it makes me sick.”

Adam was struggling a bit with the water bottle, probably still a bit tired and weak even now. Shiro crossed the kitchen and gently took it out of his hands, opening it for him.

“I didn’t know how to tell you I might never fly with you again,” Adam said quietly. “I mean, maybe someday, so I didn’t quit entirely. I asked Iverson to make me a reserve, it’ll give me more time to focus on engineering. Maybe I’ll go for some education credits and teach or something.”

“Adam, it doesn’t matter to me if you never get in a plane again,” Shiro said gently, resting his hands on the counter on either side of him. “You’re alive, that’s literally _all_ that matters. You’re alive and you’re going to be okay, that’s what’s important. You didn’t have to transfer out of the unit over it, we all would have understood.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not about all of you, it’s just about you,” Adam answered, seeming to look everywhere but at Shiro himself. “If I was on reserve in your unit you’d still be my superior officer. And…”

He paused, still not looking at Shiro. Just when it seemed he’d run out of anything else to look at, he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath.

“And I couldn’t date you if you were my superior officer. A Lieutenant dating his Captain is bad enough for normal people, with the kind of ambitions you have there will always be people out there trying to hold you back and delegitimize you. I can’t let myself be one of the things somebody uses against you some day.”

Adam opened his eyes again and took a sip of his water, still not meeting Shiro’s eyes. He left that to sink in, not saying anything else for the few long moments it took for Shiro to be certain he hadn’t heard that wrong.

“So, this was just all about you not wanting to tell me you were going reserve. It didn’t have anything to do with me saying that I love you?”

“No…it had a little bit to do with that,” Adam admitted. “I wasn’t sure what to do about it. I had to spend a few days with some friends figuring out where I stood on some things. I mean, you kind of got me at a bad time.”

“I figured that out when you high-fived me,” Shiro tried not to wince as the memory came back again, full force.

“Uh, yeah” Adam said slowly. “My IV was full of morphine. I was high as shit.”

“So if I told you I loved you right now, what would you say?” Shiro pressed. He leaned most of his weight on the counter, vividly aware of how close they were. He was starting to feel lightheaded, the weight he’d been carrying for weeks lifting.

“I’d say you better, because I’m a fucking gift,” Adam answered, a faint blush starting to creep across his face, at odds with his words. “And that you’re okay too.”

“I love you.”

“Good.” Adam’s blush became more vivid. It was new, seeing him this uncertain about anything. It was honestly the most gorgeous thing Shiro had seen in a very long time. “You’re adequate, I guess.”

He wasn’t fooling anyone. Adam’s voice was pitched just a little higher than usual, the way he got when he was faced with something he didn’t have complete control over and wasn’t entirely sure about. He was just as off-center over all of this, the playing field was far more even than Shiro had realized. Adam was still leaning back against the counter, making no attempt to push him away, and still shyly not meeting his eyes.

“Can I kiss you again?” Shiro pressed, trying not to smile and failing.

“I guess it’s the least I can do, since I ignored you for weeks.”

He’d take it. Still smiling, Shiro leaned in for another kiss. And this time, as their lips met, he thought he felt Adam smile too.

* * * * * * * * * *

_**Current day**_ :

“Hunk, I need you to call down to the chaplain,” Shiro commanded as he helped Kuro remove the loaded gurney out of Blue. “Tell him I need him in the medical bay immediately.”

“Is he dying?” Pidge asked worriedly, both Paladins following along beside the gurney for a few steps before Curtis caught up and gently nudged them back so they wouldn’t see the mess.

“Not if we have a say in it,” Shiro answered. “Actually, tell him he needs to perform a marriage and he needs to do it now.”

They both looked stunned. Hunk shook it off after a few heartbeats and hurried off to do as asked, but Pidge just stood where she was, watching them as they disappeared into the elevator that would take them up to the next floor.

Kuro stayed close to the gurney, a surgical mask covering half his face and his head tilted downward so nobody looked to hard at him. Curtis stayed at his side just in case anybody did get a clear look at him and a situation needed to be handled, while Bandor and Matt flanked the gurney to help hide Adam from view.

They didn’t want anybody to see his current state, or see Kuro injecting him with something as they got closer to the E.R. And they definitely didn’t want anybody noticing that Adam was unconscious one moment only to suck in a deep breath of air and jump slightly the next, eyes fluttering open as if he’d just had a nightmare.

They were not eyes Shiro recognized. The warm, golden brown was gone, replaced by a silver that glinted in the overhead light. In the brightness, the whites of his eyes had a pearlescent shimmer that made it clear they weren’t natural.

They were pretty, in their own way. Even the scarring around his left one gave the impression of a starburst at first glance, like a decoration rather than damage.

Those eyes were clouded, unfocused and confused as they moved the gurney into the medical bay. Three med techs were following them, irate at having been pushed away from their potential patient and not allowed to perform triage. Shiro had told them under no uncertain terms that Adam was being treated, and until his current doctor signed over his care they were to stay back and let him work.

“Good morning,” Kuro greeted Adam softly, leaning over to lightly pat his cheek to try and get his attention. “Come on, stay with me for a bit, you can rest soon.”

“Ryou,” Shiro heard Adam murmur, and was irrationally irritated that the other man’s name would be the first one Adam would say upon waking. It made sense, obviously, since that’s whose face was currently in his. It still grated though.

“Yeah, I’m here. Me, Curtis, Matt, Shiro. It’s a party.”

“I fucked up,” Adam whimpered, wincing against the light and bringing his hands up to cover his face. Shiro and Kuro each had to grab one, to keep him from smearing more blood across his face. “I tried, I really did, but I fucked up.”

“No!” Kuro assured him quietly, while Matt grabbed a canister of wipes off a counter and started trying to get some of the blood from Adam’s hands. Kuro kept him calm while they did, leaning over him and petting his hair. “You did good! You did so, so good. You took out half an armada all by yourself, and now it’s going to be easier for us to get in there. So just relax, okay? I know everything hurts, but you’re safe now. Just one more thing we need you to do, and then you can rest.”

The chaplain came in, looking just as confused as everyone else, and Shiro motioned for him to come over. Kuro and Curtis helped Adam to sit up, being careful to make it look like he was doing much of it under his own power with only a little bit of aid.

“We need a marriage officiated,” Shiro kept his voice down, because it was none of the med techs’ business what was going on over here. “A wartime authority certificate.”

“I…can do that,” the chaplain looked at the whole group of them, taking in the sheer amount of blood covering everybody. “As long as you’re aware that it can be contested later and annulled much easier than a marriage done through normal channels.”

“And that it needs to be finalized within a year of returning to Earth to remain legal if both parties survive, yes, I know,” Shiro answered. “I can tell by the way you’re staring at us you can see why this would be a bit…urgent.”

“We’ll keep it short,” the chaplain promised. He was a soldier, just like the rest of them, and aware of what went on in war time. This undoubtedly wasn’t his first emergency marriage, though it was probably his first in space, and he likely knew what it was like to do these fast so one party could get rushed off for medical treatment.

He opened the black folio he carried and started filling out the form, prompting Shiro for any information he needed. Matt and Curtis gave their information as witnesses, and then the chaplain handed the folio and pen to Shiro.

“I need you both to sign this,” he informed him. “Partners first, then witnesses attesting to the fact that both parties were of sound mind and signed willingly.”

“Of course,” Shiro took the folio and signed his name, glancing up at Matt.

Matt took a few steps back away from the gurney as Shiro turned to Adam, who was looking straight ahead with Kuro and Curtis surreptitiously supporting his weight. He looked like he was tired and in pain, fortunately, and not like he was only barely conscious and didn’t even know where he was.

“Ōkami, your turn,” Shiro announced, holding out the folio and pen for Adam to take.

At that moment, Matt’s eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the floor. The chaplain turned in surprise, hurrying over to check on him along with the med techs. Kuro took the pen and put it in Adam’s hand, pressing his fingers closed around it and guiding his hand to the paper.

“I need you to sign this,” he murmured encouragingly. “You know hospitals, you need to sign insurance forms. One little signature and you can rest.”

With some cajoling, Adam managed to get a tired signature onto the paper. Shiro blocked the whole thing from view with his own body, pretending to be worried about Matt, until Kuro hissed to him that it was done.

“I think he’s waking up,” Shiro called. Taking his cue, Matt dramatically fluttered his eyes open.

“God, I really hit my head pretty hard in that fight,” Matt groaned, making a show of wiping at the blood that was still damp up in his hairline. “I hope I don’t have a concussion. Don’t people die from those? I’m too young to die from something that stupid.”

“We have some of the best doctors Earth has to offer on this ship,” Curtis told him, signing one of the witness lines before offering the folio to Matt as he got up. “Once this is taken care of I’m sure they’ll make sure you’re not dying.”

Matt signed off on the certificate and passed the folio back to the chaplain. He signed off on it and tucked the pen away.

“Congratulations. I’ll get the paperwork filed, you should get an official state copy in two to four weeks.”

“Thank you,” Shiro was already turning back to help Curtis lift Adam off the gurney.

The stimulant was wearing off already, not able to do much with somebody who was in such bad condition. Shiro didn’t even realize how close he was to panic until the healing pod closed over him and Kuro got it started, everyone holding their breath as he ran a diagnostic. It took almost two minutes, and every second was agony.

“…okay,” Kuro let out a breath of relief, deflating a little as results started flashing up. “He’s in bad shape. Really bad shape. But it looks like he’s got enough luferin in him for healing to start, and we’ll have enough soon to get him well. He has to stay in here, nobody touches him.”

“Nobody,” Shiro promised, motioning for all of them to get out of the med bay. He paused by the med techs, who had been watching all of this from one of the desks and had long since stopped trying to get involved. Shiro yanked the dog tags off his neck and handed them to the nearest woman. “You heard him. Nobody touches that healing pod without my express permission, understand? This is his dog tag, Adam Wolf. Use it to pull up his medical records and get him entered into the system.”

He stepped out into the hall with the others and closed the door behind him.

“Curtis, the bridge is yours again,” he instructed. “Matt, you’re with him. Let the MFE pilots know they’re on call and could see action any time now. Kuro, you and Bandor are with me.”

“Okay,” Kuro followed obediently as Shiro started walking, everyone else breaking to go to their posts. “And what are we doing exactly?”

“We’re going to go see if Blue is up for letting us take her for one more spin. There’s still half an armada out there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random little notes:
> 
> On Shiro’s nicknames for Adam:
> 
> 狼 = Ōkami = wolf; literally his surname turned into a private nickname.
> 
> オオカ子 = Ōkako = not a real word. Just Shiro dropping the “mi” to shorten ōkami to ōka and adding -ko (子, child/baby) instead of -kun to go from friendly nickname to cutesy petname.
> 
> No, Adam does not understand the significance of this at this time, that’s how Shiro gets away with it.


	20. Chapter 20

_**A few hours earlier**_

“You have to focus. Don’t push, just listen. You can’t do anything until you know what’s going on around you.”

Keith sat cross-legged on the floor next to Lance, curiously listening to Camille address the handful of younger Alteans. They were out in a common room, sitting in a circle with her at one end in a chair so everyone could see her better. The two Paladins were at the far end of the circle, across from her, sitting back a bit so they wouldn’t be a distraction.

“Forget anything Anya and Karlor taught you,” Camille advised, looking around the circle of kids. “The alchemy they used was poison, it draws from a dark place. They were intentionally leading you down a path to ruin, and you need to turn back while you still can. True alchemy is light. It’s life. It’s healing and creation.”

Keith sneaked a sideways glance over at Lance, who looked unhappy to be sitting there even though he’d voluntarily joined them. Nobody was forcing him to be here, but he was so tense he might as well have been chained to the floor and held against his will.

“You were chosen to be Honerva’s personal servants, what you were taught so far might have made it seem like she was giving you power, but that’s an illusion. In time you would become addicted, like Haran and Natille were, and you would do her bidding without question just for a reason to tap that dark magic. She wanted slaves and disposable pilots for her mechs, your well-being means nothing to her. Now is the time to learn how to use your gifts against her, to protect those she wishes to do harm.”

Lance’s hands balled into fists in his lap. Keith glanced down at them, but Lance himself didn’t seem to realise he had the reaction. Just like he didn’t seem to notice that he was bouncing his knee at an almost insane pace. If the floor had been made of a softer material, everyone around him probably would have felt the vibrations.

All of the kids around them were sitting with their eyes closed, doing whatever Camille meant by “listening,” but Lance’s wide-open gaze flicked around the circle from face to face. His fingers opened again after a moment and now began moving, flicking back and forth the seed he was holding. Camille had handed them out to everyone to “practice with,” whatever that meant.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to notice that his marks were gone either, or that his hair was back to normal, hidden away by the shifting ability Alteans had. Keith had a feeling he knew what the problem might be, but he didn’t know how to broach the subject. Even knowing what it was like to suddenly find out you weren’t completely human, he wasn’t sure how to reassure Lance it wasn’t the end of the world.

He did know for a fact, though, that this little sing-along circle seemed to be doing more harm than good.

“Hey.” Keith nudged Lance lightly with an elbow, keeping his voice low. “I’m going to go do some rounds, see if anyone’s heard from Lotor or Shiro. Want to come with me?”

Lance tried to hide that he was relieved to have an excuse to leave, but he wasn’t very good at it. He nodded a little too enthusiastically, and was already getting to his feet before Keith even moved. Some of the kids opened their eyes to see what they were doing, but Camille called their attention back to her little lesson as the two of them slipped out of the room.

“Are you feeling okay?” Keith asked once they were out in the quiet hall. “You didn’t look like you were really enjoying the lecture back there.”

“I wasn’t.”

Lance was a far more expressive person than Keith could ever hope to be. He had several different kinds of frowns depending on what was bothering him, which admittedly was something nobody would realize unless they spent a lot of time watching him like Keith did, and the one he wore now was familiar.

“Do…you want to talk about it?” Keith asked as they stepped out into the privacy of the hallway. 

“Talk about what?” 

Lance was slipping back into his usual habit, pushing what was bothering him down in favor of what was going on around him. That terrible tendency to move everyone else’s problems to the forefront and keep his own quiet. It was something Keith had really only noticed since the Last Stand, but thinking back over their year in space brought up plenty of examples that he hadn’t noticed at the time. 

Lance seemed to believe that just because he was able to function with a suffocating number of issues, he was required to. He dropped his own problems the moment he saw somebody else having one, and they piled up. Keith had been blind to it for a long time, but Lance’s continued refusal to talk about his health problems over the last six months had made him look back over the last year and a half and pick out a few instances when something had seemed wrong but nothing had been said. 

“I don’t know,” Keith admitted awkwardly. He wanted to be supportive, and while that often came surprisingly easy with Lance there were still times he got tripped up. “I don’t want to assume or anything, but you seem kind of—“ 

“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do, you know?” Lance burst out, so distracted he probably hadn’t even noticed Keith was in the middle of a sentence. “Honerva’s got some pretty wicked magic going on, and she just gets stronger every day. And the best way to fight dark magic is with light magic, right? Right. So everyone who’s able to learn alchemy should, because our side needs more alchemists. Sure, we have Allura, but it’s not fair to rely on her to get strong enough to take Honerva on by herself.”

Keith slowed down a little, falling a step behind Lance to avoid being hit in the face by his wildly gesturing arms. He wasn’t just off on a verbal tangent, his whole body was in motion as if he had been physically containing whatever was wrong for too long and it was finally spilling out.

“And Camille taught me some stuff while we were on the Lorelia, really useful stuff,” Lance continued, pausing in his flailing to hold up the seed he was carrying. “But I guess what it comes down to is…I don’t want to know it. I don’t understand how people get hooked on quintessence or hooked on alchemy enough to get wrapped up in dark magic. It’s boring. It’s like being back in science class, sometimes something cool happens but most of the time I want to bash my head on the table.”

He had cupped his hands over the seed, and now he opened them to show that the seed was sprouted. Lance might have thought it was boring but Keith was intrigued, his eyes glued to the greenery as Lance’s hands kept working while he spoke. The little sprout kept changing as he twirled it around one finger, getting longer, small leaves beginning to unwind from the stem.

“I know I should be thankful, it’s like a gift or whatever, but I wish it came with a receipt because I really don’t want it. We need every gifted Altean we can get our hands on to get ready for war, but I don’t even want to be Altean. They all keep acting like I’m one of them, like I should have the same raging obsession with the future of Altea. Literally everything they do is with this extinct planet in mind, Keith. Everything.”

The stem stopped getting longer, developing a bud on the end. It slowly bloomed, turning into a bright pink flower Keith thought he had seen before. It was something like a lily, he thought he remembered seeing them in the memory chamber in the Castle of Lions once.

“And I get it,” Lance was still on a roll, he didn’t even seem to notice what he was doing as he finished and shoved the flower into Keith’s hands so he could start swinging his arms wildly again. “I really do! It’s not about the Altea that’s already gone, it’s about building a new one. It’s about the future of their people. They have nowhere really safe, they’re hunted by a huge empire, everything I’ve ever taken for granted growing up are things they’d love to have. And I want to help! I want to help them get Colony Two built, I want to help them have a place where families aren’t separated and everyone is safe. But I don’t want to do this!”

Keith was turning the flower over in his hands, still marveling at the fact that a few minutes ago it had only been a seed. It certainly wasn’t on Allura’s level, she was now at the point where she was creating life seemingly out of thin air with pure quintessence and nothing else, but it was still amazing. He looked up at Lance as the brown faded from his hair and the red marks washed back in on his cheeks.

“These feels like…brands.”

A lot of the fire was gone from Lance’s voice when he said that, leaving him sounding tired and sad. He reached up to touch his face with both hands, his fingers brushing the spots where the golden brown skin was marked with red.

“I don’t feel like I found some forgotten, important part of my heritage. I feel like I got dragged away from Earth and thrown in a cell and branded so I have to remember it every time I look in the mirror. I know I don’t deserve to feel like that, but I don’t know how to stop.”

Lance stopped walking, his eyes on the floor as he lightly rubbed the marks. Lance wasn’t big on crying in front of everyone but he was still more open about it than some, and Keith could see he was headed in that direction. He tucked the flower behind his ear to free his hands, wrapping his arms around Lance to hug him from behind.

“It’s okay to not like them, you know,” he said carefully, trying to make sure he worded what he wanted to say right. “It’s okay if you don’t want to learn alchemy. It’s okay if you don’t even want to let people know you have Altean blood. Nobody’s going to make you do any of that, Lance. You’re part of a small group of people who have saved the universe—not just Altea, the whole universe—and you didn’t do it with alchemy.

“You did it as a Paladin. As our sharpshooter. Nobody has any right to tell you how to fight in this war, not with your resume. Finding out you’re a little different than you thought you were doesn’t suddenly change who you are or how you have to see the world.”

Lance didn’t say anything. His hands fell away from his face, his arms hanging limply at his sides. He stared down at the ground for an uncomfortably long time, leaving the silence to stretch on and Keith uncertain of whether he’d said something wrong or if he should try again.

“You don’t understand. I remember Altea,” Lance finally broke the quiet, his voice low. “Being in the quintessence field for so long wiped out everything, when I woke up in the pod at the outpost I was a blank slate except for some kind of language default. Honerva was the only one who understood me because I was speaking ancient Altean.”

Keith felt him reach up and gently pry his arms open, stepping out of his hold. Lance turned to face him, a guilty look flitting across his face.

“She helped my memory start coming back, but it wasn’t like she could really pick and choose what I got. That’s why she needed the suppressors, she couldn’t draw a line at where the memories should stop. It’s like she hit ‘restore’ but it also brought up a bunch of files that should’ve stayed deleted. I remember destroying Daibazaal, Keith. _I_ started this war, _I_ did this. Saying now that I don’t want to be an Altean because it’s too hard is like, way past the level of hypocrite.”

He reached up to lightly take the flower from behind Keith’s ear, turning it over in his fingers.

“You know me…epic screw up. Do you really think I could learn how to do something like this in just a few days? I don’t remember much, but every time Camille tells me something new it clicks fast. Like I already know it and just need a reminder. I should be trying to remember everything I used to know, I should be stepping up to train until I’m on Allura’s level. But half the time when I try to sleep I have nightmares about that outpost and when I wake up I just want to go home. Thinking about all the things I might remember, about how much farther into the war I might get dragged, it’s just…terrifying.”

He sighed, running a hand through his hair and closing his eyes.

“I sound crazy, I know. But please don’t think I’m insane.”

“I don’t.”

Keith rested a hand on Lance’s shoulder, turning him around and nudging him forward. He draped an arm lazily across his shoulders as they changed direction to head toward the hangar.

At least he didn’t have to figure out how to break the news of how they were all linked to their Lions now. Keith had been worried he would be the one to sound crazy, and there wasn’t exactly an easy way to tell Lance he was some kind of reborn alien royalty. Sort of.

“So, if you remember Daibazaal, do you remember the war?” He asked gently. “Do you remember what happened after? I mean, the Castle and everything?”

“Some of it,” Lance admitted. “Some of it is just concepts, you know? Not straight memories, just ideas. I remember being a Paladin before, and being the only one left. And it’s like anything else, just us talking about it right now brings back even more. Like, now I can remember that I didn’t have the only active Lion. Queen Melenor was flying Blue, she took over because Queen Merla went nuclear and couldn’t handle it.”

“Queen Merla?” Coran hadn’t said anything about Merla being royal. But it made sense that he wouldn’t, the only people he ever referred to regularly with their titles were Alfor, Melenor, and Allura.

“Honerva’s sister,” Lance answered. “Shiro mentioned her earlier and her name’s kind of been bouncing around in my head since then. Queen Merla of Nalquod.”

“She married Blaytz?”

“Well, he was always there and flirting,” Lance said with a slight shrug. “As smart a woman as she is, she loves a terrible life decision. She wouldn’t hang around us if she didn’t, someone should probably give her an intervention.”

He stopped as he realized what he’d said, bringing them both to a halt and rubbing his face with his hands. He made some kind of noise, but Keith couldn’t tell if he was actually saying words or if it was just random, muffled sounds of frustration.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Keith assured him. “I know it’s probably weird right now, but we’ll find a way to fix it, okay?”

They were at the hangar doors. Keith took Lance’s hand and pulled him out of the hallway, across the hangar and over to the Black Lion. He wanted some privacy and some quiet, so they could have a real discussion without worrying about being overheard. Once they were inside he steered Lance to the pilot seat, pushing him down into it and seating himself on the edge of his control panel.

“Look, I know what you’re going through. I’m not saying I understand it, I’m saying I know about it,” he reassured him. “While you were gone, we learned from Coran and Allura that people have something called cores. They’re like little balls of quintessence that everyone carries around at their…uh, core.”

“They’re souls,” Lance said dully, groaning and running his hands through his hair. “See what I mean? Two minutes ago I didn’t know that. Now that you brought it up and I thought about it, I can remember.”

“Good, that will make this easier, then. Do you remember that the Lions saved their Paladins’ cores when they were killed? The way Black saved Shiro?”

“They were all supposed to be moved into the Red Lion,” Lance closed his eyes, frowning in thought as if trying to remember. “She had a course to a planet where they were supposed to be released already programmed into her maps. Everyone was going to abandon the Castle of Lions and hide, the mainframe was programmed to purge everyone’s ID information except Allura, Coran, and the Paladins once the Lions were gone.”

“Why a purge?” That was news to Keith. Then again, this seemed like knowledge very specific to Alfor, it was possible Coran didn’t know.

“Safeguard,” Lance answered, eyes still closed. “The Galra were hunting down Alteans. It was to make sure nobody could decide to trade Allura or the Black Lion for their own lives if they were caught. The Castle would only recognize seven IDs, nobody else would get in.”

“Not even Melenor or Merla? ”

“Not Melenor, not Merla. Not Melenor’s sister Orla. Nobody,” Lance answered, opening his eyes. This was all news to Lance, Keith could see, just like it was news to him. “They all knew once they walked out the door they could never come back, unless it was escorted by a Paladin or with Allura’s permission. The Castle would just register them as an unknown. But the plan never got set into motion, I…Alfor died before he could go through with it.”

“He did,” Keith agreed. “But Merla was an alchemist. Melenor piloted Blue, Merla handled the cores like Alfor was going to do. That’s why the Castle let us in when we got there, Lance. Because you have Alfor’s signature, sure, but you’re not the only one. Hunk has Gyrgan’s, Pidge has Trigel’s. And I have Zarkon’s.”

Now Keith was at the point he was trying to make. They were definitely going to have to probe a bit more and see how much Lance could remember to their benefit, but he didn’t want to turn this into an interrogation no matter how curious he was. Keith lightly kicked Lance’s shin, making him look up at him.

“Do you think I’m as bad as Zarkon?”

“Why would you even ask that??”

“It’s a simple question,” Keith answered. “Am I as bad as Zarkon? You understand what cores are, well I’m carrying Zarkon’s. Do you think I should be punished for the rift not being closed and for letting Honerva get addicted to quintessence?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because that wasn’t you,” Lance replied. “Zarkon was Zarkon, you’re you. You didn’t do any of that.”

“Then why do you feel like you should be punished for Alfor’s choices?” Keith pushed. “Because you happen to remember? Because you were a war prisoner and the way they tortured and used you happened to end up with you remembering things somebody else did? You have a piece of Alfor in you. It might give you some shared personality traits and access to some kind of shared memory drive, but it doesn’t make you him. Lance McClain is not responsible today for anything King Alfor did ten thousand years ago.

“If you believe you are, then you have to also believe that I’m responsible for enabling Honerva in the first place. You have to believe Pidge and Hunk are responsible for not stepping in before everything fell apart. And you have to believe Adam, as Blue’s original pilot, is responsible for not doing anything to stop anyone either.”

He could see the struggle on Lance’s face, and his heart broke a little. In the last week he had been through more than most of them ever had, in the times the rest of them had been captive it had always been as a group and they’d never been alone. Sure, James had been there, but Honerva’s focus had undoubtedly been on Lance. Even now that Keith could see a larger picture, that Acxa had needed one of them to rescue Lotor and couldn’t just trust anyone with the truth, there had undoubtedly only been so much she could do to mitigate the damage done.

Sometimes being a casualty of war didn’t mean you died. Shiro was a good example of that, and Keith had a feeling once they found Adam the results would be similar.

“Do you think any of it is their fault?” Keith asked.

Lance had made it clear to him that he was a person of words, and so Keith wanted to make sure everything was laid out very clearly with words. Lance wasn’t going to spontaneously decide it wasn’t his job to answer for Alfor’s actions, even though it wasn’t, but Keith wanted to ensure there was no ambiguity for him to overanalyze later and slide further into guilt.

“No,” Lance admitted. “It’s not their fault.”

“It’s not,” Keith agreed. “And it’s not yours either. There are always a lot of people at fault for starting a war, but none of us are those people. Would it be smart of you to learn all the alchemy you can if you really do have access to some of Alfor’s knowledge? I think so, for a lot of reasons. But whether or not you do is up to you, and you don’t owe it to anyone to use it in a way you don’t want to. You’ve already done more for Altea than the rest of us.”

Lance scoffed, and Keith knew what he was thinking. They had already talked earlier with Acxa and James, Keith had already gotten a much more detailed report on everything that had gone down since Lance disappeared. He didn’t doubt Lance was still thinking about their fight with Lotor and the Sincline, about his failure to avoid having it happen in the first place.

“We know now that Lotor is trying to do what’s best for the Alteans,” Keith said reasonably. “We didn’t know it before because he didn’t trust us with that information. He didn’t tell Acxa how bad of an issue he was having, and he let himself get riled up enough to take the fight into the quintessence field. His choices got him dumped in there as much as anyone else’s.

“But you went in there and you brought him out. Your reasons don’t matter, what matters is that you braved going into the rift, without the rest of us for backup, and you brought him out. You helped get about a dozen of the strongest gifted Alteans Honerva had away from her before she could corrupt them into her druids or make them suicide mech pilots. You helped get Lotor away from her. You got us here to help.”

There was something else, as loathe as Keith was to say it out loud. It wasn’t that he wasn’t open to changing his opinions or the way he thought about things, he just didn’t like admitting out loud that his thoughts on things might be changing. It was sort of like admitting he was wrong. Keith didn’t hate being wrong, he just hated admitting it out loud in case people used it against him. But he was learning how much this particular topic meant to people in his life.

“I don’t know Adam very well, but…those outposts are hardly high security. I don’t think you and James are the first captives to come through there that escaped, especially not over the course of a year and a half. But you were the first ones to give him a reason to get up and do anything. Shiro was starting to suspect he was alive, and he would have tracked him down eventually, but by the time he did that other faction would’ve already taken the outpost and probably killed him. So, you’re also kind of responsible for bringing back something really, really important to Shiro. And that’s really important to me.”

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” Lance asked with a tired little smile, resting his head on one hand. “So many bad things have gone down in the last few weeks, but if they didn’t then there are a bunch of good things that wouldn’t have either. Story of our lives, huh? Just a great big history of bad decisions that ultimately ended up with billions of lives saved.”

“Well, life’s not a movie,” Keith agreed. “Good results aren’t a straight shot, there’s a lot of bad mixed in along the way.”

He held out his hands and Lance took them, letting himself be pulled back to his feet. Keith remained seated on the console as he tugged Lance forward so he could hug him lightly around the middle.

“Whatever you decide to do with this whole alchemy thing, I’ve got your back,” he promised. “If you want to try to learn it, fine. If you want to try to learn just a little, fine. If you don’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole, fine. If anybody else has anything to say about it they can say it to me. We’ll take it as a team…I’ll hold them, you hit them.”

Lance was trying to stay somber, but he gave in and cracked a smile at that, ducking his head a little to try and hide it.

“That’s the Samurai everyone knows and loves. Kill first, ask questions later.”

“It’s a great system, it always works like a charm up until the “ask questions” part,” Keith answered. He let his head fall forward to rest against Lance’s shoulder, and felt Lance’s arms settle lightly around him in turn.

They had a few brief moments of peace before Black’s console started beeping, drawing their attention to the overlay that popped up next to where Keith was half-sitting. They both looked over at the same time, waiting to see if a communication would actually come through. Black’s comms had been doing this off and on for a few hours, since Shiro and the girls had left and Keith had begun monitoring. Somebody was trying to get through, but the storms that had once been so vital in protecting this place from enemy sensors were cutting off the outside world and contact was never made.

This time was different. After a few seconds Pidge’s frowning face came into view, her eyes on her console as she typed up a storm. She glanced up at them then back at what she was doing, then started when she realized her hail had finally gone through.

“Keith!” She exclaimed, then brightened when she saw he wasn’t alone. “Lance! You’re okay!”

Lance let Keith go to sit on the edge of the pilot seat, lighting up like a kid on Christmas day. Keith watched him fondly as he quickly hid away his face marks and changed his hair color again, leaning forward on the console to get a little closer.

“Pidge! I am, so is James! Where are you? Is Hunk here too?”

“He’s over with Allura helping fix Sincline’s long range comms,” Pidge answered, leaning over to hit some buttons and add them on. “Hold on, I’ll connect their helmet mics. Hunk! Allura! I finally got Keith and Lance on the line!”

“Hunk, you there?” Lance was so adorably excited. Keith had never had a best friend, Shiro was the closest thing he’d had to that, but he kind of understood how happy he must be right now.

“Lance! Buddy!” Hunk sounded so happy too. Keith finally pulled his eyes away to look over at Pidge, who looked like she might explode.

He supposed he’d always underestimated how close the three of them were. But it sort of made sense, Pidge hadn’t been extremely close to them at the Garrison but the three of them had been a crew, and they’d started this journey so long ago together. There was just something the three of them shared that the others would never be in on. Not necessarily stronger or better than what they all shared as a group, just different.

Keith didn’t interrupt. Time wasn’t necessarily on their side with the storm, but he let them banter back and forth in silence. Hunk and Pidge had worked just as hard as he had to track Lance and James down, they deserved their moment.

“I’m glad you guys are okay, Lance. But if we want to keep it that way, there’s some intel we have to get to you before the storm weakens our signal again.” It was actually Pidge who drew them back to the matter at hand, forwarding a visual feed of the atmosphere above. “This is what your sky looks like right now.”

“Holy crow, that’s a freaking legion,” Lance exclaimed, sitting back heavily in the chair with his eyes widening slightly at the sight of so many newly arrived cruisers. “Where’d they all come from? There were only two when we landed!”

“They’re in a Gorik Formation,” Allura’s voice came over the line. “Enough cruisers firing with enough force with just the right spacing will stress a planet enough to cause its destruction. They’ve lined up to take out the whole planet you’re on once given the signal.”

“This isn’t good,” Keith frowned. “They have a lot of firepower there. We have Sincline, but Romelle and Veronica aren’t practiced enough to have it at full capacity. We might have all five Lions…is Shiro there? Did you guys find Lotor?”

“No,” Allura admitted. “When we saw how many ships were there, Shiro went ahead and we stayed behind. For now we’re holding, but at least we’re in the air in case we do need to start taking cruisers down.”

“We need Shiro back before we can be of any real use at all,” Keith mused. “Four Lions can definitely do some damage, but not enough and not fast enough if they’re going to blow the planet. Even if Blue made it back, unless Shiro’s in the pilot seat there’s no way we’re forming Voltron. Adam would be an unsynced pilot, we wouldn’t make it.”

“The Atlas is here,” Hunk pointed out. “We have her extra firepower too.”

“Which is good,” Lance nodded. “But again, without Shiro to transform it into a form with powered up weapons the Atlas is just a single war ship.”

“We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Keith said. “If we attack the armada as we are, we don’t have enough firepower to take down enough ships fast enough to stop them from destroying the whole planet. And even if we do, our attack will announce that we’re here and the Galra down on the colony might kill any hostages. On the flipside, if we attack the colony to free any hostages first, that will clue the cruisers in and they might start their attack.”

“I think our best bet for the moment is to continue to hold up here,” Allura reasoned. “We have to wait for Shiro to return and see if he brings Adam. If that’s the case, we’ll have Sincline, five Lions, and the Atlas. If we can get Griffin up here we’ll also have the full team of MFE pilots. Perhaps the MFEs can hit the colony while the bigger ships take the cruisers.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Lance answered. “Lotor also said something about this planet having defenses, that’s why he wanted to land here. Unfortunately they’re so old nobody alive will know about them but him. If we sit tight until they get back we might be able to add something else useful into the equation.”

“Yeah, I think it’s better to wait and make sure we take advantage of everything that’s available,” Hunk chimed in. “Sincline’s comms are just about fixed, if we absolutely have to fight before Shiro gets back at least we’ll have that and two Lions up here at the ready.”

“Okay. I’m not going to disagree,” Keith shrugged. “We’ll be out of the loop down here once this comm hole closes, but we’ll try to figure out how to get us permanently connected in the meantime. We’ll see if there’s some way for us to monitor those cruisers from here while we’re at it.”

“That storm trajectory shows it’s got another four hours or so,” Pidge informed them. “And then…bad news. This planet’s a lot like Earth in hurricane season and the valley you’re in is near a coast. Two more storms are forming out over the ocean, even if they don’t hit for days these things are huge and you’ll probably only have a few hours without interference.”

“Great,” Lance muttered. “A sky full of Galra cruisers between us and we won’t even be able to talk about it. I wonder if we’ll ever have a mission on a nice, quiet beach in Cancun fall into our laps.”

“As Slav would say, probably in some reality,” Hunk answered. “Hey, speaking of Slav…when we were looking over the Lion specs last week he got really interested in something but wouldn’t talk about it. When I saw him yesterday, he said he thinks the Lions have some kind of collective teludav system.”

“Don’t they take up a whole room?” Keith asked, looking over at Pidge since he didn’t have a visual on Hunk. “That one on the Castle of Lions held all five of us with plenty of room to spare. And the one on the Atlas is pretty big too.”

“Normally yeah. But I looked at what he was talking about and I think he might be right. If you don’t know what you’re looking for you’ll go right past it, but the lenses that focus the Lions mouth lasers have two sides. The back side is convex and coated with scaultrite. But the lasers feed energy in from the sides, there’s no need for a back side unless that lens flips over for something.”

“The scaultrite lenses in the teludav are convex,” Pidge noted. “They bounce the power generated by the core off of each other to magnify it until it’s strong enough to fuel a wormhole. If the Lions run on quintessence I guess it’s somewhere in the realm of possibility that they could bounce that power off of each other to create wormholes. They’d be much smaller than what the Castle or Atlas can do though, probably just big enough for the Lions to get through separately.”

“Are you telling me the Lions had a long distance jump feature and we still spent months on an interstellar road trip?” Lance exclaimed.

“We said it’s possible, not that it’s definite,” Hunk corrected him. “Besides, there’s a ton of stuff about these Lions we still don’t know. I don’t think even the original Paladins knew all the stuff these babies could do.”

“Besides,” Allura chimed in, “Even if it’s there, it’s completely different from a regular teludav and we won’t know how to use it. I’ll have to look at what Slav found to see what’s going on. Either way, the secondary scaultrite lens means there’s _something_ there, perhaps some kind of technology Honerva doesn’t know of. We’ll have to put it on the To Do list for later.”

“All right. We’re going to go let the others know about the cruisers,” Keith told them. “Send a regular update transmission every hour, up it to every half hour if things look like they’re changing. It may get through, it may not, but just in case.”

“Be careful down there, guys,” Pidge said.

“You guys too,” Lance answered. He looked so very cozy in Black’s pilot seat, grinning brightly as he reached for the console but stopped with his hand hovering over the controls as he looked to Keith. “Can I do the honors?”

“Be my guest,” Keith tried not to smile, but it was difficult since Pidge could see them and was snickering a little at Lance’s enthusiasm. “Just don’t get too comfortable with my job.”

“Black Lion, out,” Lance announced, giving Pidge a salute and ending the transmission.

He leaned back in the seat, putting one foot up on the edge of the console. Keith didn’t feel any reaction from Black, but the position did irritate him a little bit. Of course, it still irritated him to look at Lance through the comm videos and see him sitting with his feet up on Red’s console, too.

It was just one of his little peeves. He decided to let it go.

“So we have a whole Galra armada lined up to destroy this planet at any moment,” Lance said, holding up a hand so he could count on his fingers. “A colony that may or may not still have about three hundred surviving Altean kids being held captive…that Honerva will vaporize even with the Galra troops still occupying it.

“Hitting the colony with the Lions will be fast and efficient, but it will tip off the armada and they’ll trash the planet. Hitting the armada will knock out enough ships to save the planet, but give the colony a heads up so they have time to either kill the captives or load them up and shuttle them off-world. Waiting for Shiro to get back with Adam will give us five Lions and the Atlas, along with the Sincline, but there are a lot of wild cards as far as our pilot efficiency. That’s it, I’m out of fingers. I don’t even want to keep going, one hand of problems is enough.”

“We also have no way of being kept up to date on whether Shiro’s back or if he found Adam,” Keith continued for him on his own hand. “We have no idea what kind of defenses this colony has for us to use if Lotor doesn’t make it back. We have only four experienced soldiers here, and a dozen kids who will be no good in a large-scale ship fight. The one ship we have is a runner with no weapons. And we don’t actually know where Honerva is or if she’s going to show up and make this all worse.”

“I said I didn’t want to keep going for a reason, Keith. Now we have two hands of problems, are you happy?”

“Well, we have two hands of problems, but we also have two separate teams I guess,” Keith supposed.

“Us here on the ground, and everyone else up there,” Lance agreed. He frowned, cocking his head to the side slightly. “Hey. Those ships…with that many, they were bound to see the Sincline and Blue leave, right?”

“Most likely.”

“But there were only two when we landed, and they didn’t pick us up. So nobody had any idea we were already here until they left, let alone how many of us.”

“Probably not.” Keith was pretty sure he could see where Lance was going, but he didn’t interrupt.

“So it’s definitely a possibility they all thought Lotor was in the Sincline and anybody else was evacuated in Blue. Her hold could definitely fit everyone who escaped on the Lorelia.”

“Which means it’s definitely a possibility they don’t know there are more of us down here,” Keith finished for him. “And they won’t know, as long as they don’t see another Lion down here.”

Both Paladins fell silent for a moment, going over the advantages and disadvantages of that. This basically meant that all Galra would be watching the sky, and that the cruisers above were likely prepared to close in and form a protective net to keep any enemies from getting down here to the planet’s surface. They wouldn’t be looking for any Paladins or other attackers here on the ground.

Keith looked down to Lance at the same time Lance looked up at him, both of them seeming to decide as one that the same very bad idea was actually looking like a very good one at this moment in time.

“We’re going to go in on foot,” they said in unison.

“It’s a really terrible plan,” Keith warned.

“Oh, definitely,” Lance agreed. “Like you said, four soldiers and a dozen kids. Against God only knows how many occupying Galra.”

“We have about as good a chance of all being killed as we do of succeeding.”

“Slightly higher chance of being killed, probably.”

“But what are we supposed to do, waste what time we have doing nothing?”

“I mean, every hour we do nothing is another we could have been at least chipping away at their defenses. Who knows? One handful of guards less now could mean the difference between winning and losing later.”

Keith was already getting up, heading for Black’s hold to see if there was anything of use packed there. “Your bayard is up in Red, will you be okay without it?”

“I still have a gun or two I took from the armory last week,” Lance called after him. “They’ll never know what hit them.”

Keith stopped just outside the doorway to Black’s cockpit, looking back. Lance was still sitting in the pilot seat, glancing around at Black’s consoles and controls. He seemed almost wistful for a moment, then he reached over and patted one of Black’s levers.

“Sorry, buddy. It never would have worked out between us,” he said softly. “My lady’s the only one for me.”

Keith tried not to snort out loud as Lance scampered out of the seat, leaving the cockpit to join him.

* * * * * * * * * *

“The layout of the colony looks to the untrained eye like it’s just for aesthetics, but it actually has some serious defense in mind.”

Acxa stood in the middle of the cafeteria, the tables pushed back out of the way and a rough outline sketched out under her feet. There wasn’t much in the way of pens and paper in a decommissioned bunker, but the supply crates were lined with some kind of porous material for absorbing moisture that worked well enough in place of chalk.

She had been way faster to agree to their insane idea than Lance had expected her to be, and from the looks of it she had been planning to ditch them and go on her own if nothing started happening soon.

“It sits in a prehistoric lake bed, with what would be considered its back up against a high cliff wall. The wall arcs around it, becoming low hills toward the other end as the lake bed becomes more shallow. The colony itself is built in a step-design, with a market district running along the less defended end and the residential district in the second ring after that. The third ring is a commercial district, it has things like the school and administrative buildings.

“In the middle is an actual lake, which was artificially built and serves as the fresh water source. It comes from tapping an underground river in the cave system within the cliffs. In the middle of that lake is the central command building. That’s where colony leaders meet, where law courts are held, and where military leaders meet. It’s also what we colloquially call “the Fallback.”

“It has two floors that go even further underground than the lake bed,” Tiselle chimed in, stepping over to the circle that represented the central command. “These are reinforced defensive spaces for civilians to fall back to in the case of attack. It’s the most secure place on this planet…or at least I thought so before I found out this bunker was here.”

“If the Fallback was constructed for the civilians of the whole colony, it must be big enough to hold a few hundred kids permanently,” Keith supposed.

“It is,” Acxa nodded. “The place is only meant to be a temporary hideaway, a few hours to a day at most, so it was never built for comfortable living. The colony had its own military to repel threats, the Fallback was just meant to protect during the initial outbreak of fighting until the guard could regroup and begin evacuation. Honerva dismantled that defense by coming in under the guise of a friend.”

“How sure are we that this is where they’re keeping them?” Lance asked, slowly walking around the sketch of the colony. “I mean, are there any other places here that might be better for some reason?”

“Different question,” James asked from where he stood across from Keith. “Something’s been bothering me about this. There are just way too many Galra here for only a few hundred kids, especially when it would have been easier to just take them and keep them at a facility on a Galra base. Why did the Alteans pick this planet? For their first colony, I mean.”

“It was off the beaten path at the time,” Acxa answered. “And close to the Quantum Abyss, which is the evacuation destination for emergencies.”

“But it was still dangerous enough that they needed a bunker in the beginning,” James pointed out. “So why here? Ten thousand years ago the Blue Lion was flown all the way to Earth, so we know unmapped parts of the universe were reachable. And from our own research we know there are other planets beyond ours that are suitable for life. So why here? Why even pick a place where you need to have an emergency hideout like the Quantum Abyss?”

“I don’t know,” Acxa admitted, looking down at her drawing. “It was a little bit before my time, you know.”

“Why does it even matter?” Keith asked.

“Because,” James answered, not turning away from Acxa. “Altean nature seems to be an awful lot like human nature. What about Colony Two? It’s on a hostile planet that’s easily cut off from supply routes. Why? Why choose a planet that could take hundreds of years of domestication just to become somewhat survivable? Again, when there are plenty of planets a lot like Earth out a little bit farther?”

“Because that planet is rocky and has an almost excessive supply of an ore ancient Alteans used,” Acxa answered. “And I don’t mean from 10,000 years ago. In his research Lotor found that the Alteans that were ancient even in his time had once used a metal that was far more conducive to quintessence than anything else found ever since. The tech we made with it functioned more efficiently and even non-gifted Alteans could use it to perform tasks normally only alchemists could do.”

“So it’s the kind of ore that Alteans specifically would really, really want,” James surmised. “Maybe the kind of ore you’d use to make mechs that can absorb the quintessence of everything around them?”

Acxa and Tiselle looked up at each other suddenly.

“The old mines?” Tiselle remembered. “They’ve been blocked off since I was little. Could she know about those?”

“She might. Some of the older tech on this planet is made of psyferite, she’d know we they had to get it somewhere.”

“Hold on,” Lance finally got it into his head what they were saying. “Are you telling me those mechs are made of a special metal Honerva got from here?”

“Here, and from Oriande,” Camille spoke up from where she’d been leaning quietly against the wall. Lance thought she looked tired, and she probably was.

She was the best-trained alchemist currently in this place, even though she was only a novice herself, and she was trying to guide a bunch of kids away from the druidic arts and back to alchemy. That was a lot of work.

“You’ve been to Oriande?” Keith asked her, sounding surprised.

“Of course. We all have, it’s where Honerva took us before choosing those she’d begin to teach. Is there something about me that makes me seem unworthy of Oriande to you?”

“No,” Keith didn’t sound the least bit apologetic about how he might have sounded. “There’s a lot about you that makes you seem too sane and rational to have been through her cult recruitment camp.”

Camille smiled a little, pushing away from the wall and stepping out onto the colony sketch.

“On Oriande, much of the technology was created using psyferite. A lot of it is built into the planet and the temple, making it impossible to use, but there was also a good deal that had been made to create art and statues. Honerva melted that down to build the first of her mechs. We were all wondering why the others were built on the outpost, but now I understand…we had used all of the psyferite that was easy to get on Oriande, and she was moving her lab closer to her new source.”

“The psyferite mine never actually ran dry,” Acxa explained. “We just stopped mining it once the rift gate was done. That was where it was all going, so that probably played a big part in why the planet was chosen in the first place. It’s not a huge source, but since it’s so rare any source is significant. But mining it and transporting it to a new colony would be a pain, so one of the requirements of the Colony Two planet was that it have a usable supply of psyferite.”

“But young children can’t work in a mine,” James reminded everyone. “And there’s no reason to have a full Galra occupation of a colony if the only ones to keep in line are a couple hundred little kids. So maybe we’d better consider the possibility that the adults who were watching these kids and the teens who weren’t gifted are very much alive and being put to work.”

Everyone fell silent as the idea hung on the air. It was the kind of thing that made Lance feel hopeful, but also a little bit sick at the same time. There could be a lot more Alteans still left alive than they had thought, hidden away where Acxa would never have been able to get in contact. But they wouldn’t be in very good health, considering what the Galra called hospitality.

“What was the population of this colony?” Keith asked finally. “Before Lotor disappeared?”

“A little less than four thousand,” Acxa answered. “About twenty-five hundred kids under eighteen and another thousand or so adults keeping it running.”

“And Camille, about how many did Honerva take to Oriande?”

“I don’t know,” Camille admitted. “Too many for me to count. But from what I saw of the group I was in when I was tested, about half of us turned out to be gifted.”

“So if she hasn’t touched the kids under eight yet, that’s about three hundred we know of,” James started counting out. “Of what was left, if Honerva’s got half of them…that means about eleven hundred kids on Oriande. Take what’s left and add the adults, that means we have a little over two thousand Alteans unaccounted for.”

“That’s a number that makes a full Galra occupation make a lot more sense,” Lance agreed. “Especially if she’s got them mining psyferite _and_ smelting ore here.”

“That’s a number that also makes it much more urgent for us to act,” Acxa said. “It was one thing if we were breaking in and smuggling out a few hundred kids on a transport before the planet got destroyed. It’s very much another if we have two thousand more stuck underground where we can’t get to them.”

“Then our priority is to cripple the Galra occupation and take the colony,” Keith decided. “It needs to fall fast, without tipping off that armada that anything is wrong. Then we need to find out how many captives we’re actually dealing with and make contact with the Atlas. We can go from there.”

“So we’re still back to square one, which is how we’re going to do this,” Lance said, studying the map. “You said you only knew this bunker was here because part of security checks was to make sure the tunnels were sealed. How close to the town here will these tunnels get us?”

“Right outside of it,” Acxa pointed to a spot in the hills near the market district. “From there we’d have to find a way to sneak past anybody who might be guarding the entrance or the other districts.”

“Or maybe we won’t,” Tiselle took the chalk from Acxa and moved over to circle a spot on the cliff wall. “The lake is fed by an underground river, but there are three points where the water is diverted through caverns and out into the lake bed. Two are too far down for us to even try, but a third has a grate that comes up slightly above water level. There’s a cave system behind it where the water flows, Farla and I used to explore it.”

“Do you know it well enough to get from a cave entrance to the grate?” Keith asked. Tiselle nodded. “Then that’s our way in. We just have to get from the tunnel entrance to the caves without being seen. Will the storm help cover us?”

“Maybe,” Acxa said thoughtfully. “The colony is actually pretty far from here. As in, tens of miles. It was built far enough away from the coast to avoid the storm interference. There’s a high speed transport system that Camille is probably skilled enough to work…maybe Ariella as well since she trained for that mech. Your helmet comm patches through the Black Lion, so you probably won’t be able to use it still. But the worst that will be going on there as far as weather is probably some heavy wind.”

“Okay,” Keith stepped up to take charge now, looking over the map. “We leave in half an hour. Everybody get as decent of armor as you can find and get armed. Lance, James, Acxa, we’ll be going in through the lake and hitting the Central Command building. Hopefully if we cut off the head of the snake we can take everything apart from there. Camille, you and Ariella get ready to work the transport, you’re basically going to be playing getaway driver if things go south. Get any of the older kids who can heal ready, we may find captives who need immediate medical care. Tiselle, you and Farla will guide us through the cave system and wait there, you’ll take anybody we can get out to you back to the transport.”

Camille and Tiselle nodded, and jogged off to grab the others.

The rest of them were already armored and armed and ready to go. Lance looked from Acxa and James to Keith.

“Four of us against a whole colony crawling with Galra,” he commented. “Doesn’t really seem like a fair fight.”

“No, it’s not a fair fight,” Keith answered, giving that overconfident little smirk he was so fond of. “But if we’re feeling nice when we get there maybe we can hold back a little and give them a fighting chance.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I get commentary telling me Blayz was flirting with a male galra and is gay: I HC Blaytz being bi in this fic series.
> 
> Adam, Lance, Blaytz, Alfor: bi. Shiro, Keith, Curtis, Kuro: gay. That’s just how they are in this particular fic.
> 
> There are further Not Straight people on this roller coaster ride, but we haven’t gotten there yet.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little bit of creepiness toward the end of this chapter. Nothing terribly explicit, but it does get a little horror movie-ish.

The bunker transport system had been made with a quick escape in mind, a round shaft that ran underground away from the bunker itself. It ran beneath a narrow point in the nearby mountain range that protected the colony from the storms of the coast, a seventy mile stretch in full.

The system itself was similar to the Paladins’ speeders, propelled through a friction-less vacuum by an Altean channeling quintessence to fuel it instead of a Lion. Camille and Ariella had little trouble with it once they got it up and running, even ferrying a narrow shuttle carrying eight people at once instead of one.

Even with the severity of the situation, Lance felt a splash of relief as he climbed quietly out of the darkened tunnel into sunlight filtering through a canopy of leaves. It was windy here, even in the very small clearing protected by trees, but the air was clean and fresh instead of warm and recycled.

The plants here were very different from Earth, reminding him of pictures of prehistoric jungle he had seen in his dinosaur books when he was a kid; towering ferns and giant leaves hanging down overhead that made him check his atmospheric monitors. There was about ten percent more oxygen in this atmosphere than on Earth.

“Hey, I know I probably should have asked before we were out here making targets of ourselves, but what kind of animals does this planet have?” He asked, turning to watch Acxa haul herself out of the bunker hatch behind him. “Are they normal sized, or are they like…really big?”

“There are no animals here,” Acxa answered, kicking the hatch closed behind her. “This planet was a barren rock when it was colonized, the atmosphere and biodome were created artificially over time. The only other living things here besides plants and people are genetically modified pollinators.”

“Oh.” Lance looked around again, at the eerie junglescape dancing in the wind. Somehow, the fact that it was empty out there made it even creepier. “That’s cool. Not horror movie fodder or anything.”

“Where are we in relation to the colony?” James asked, looking up at the canopy overhead. “And is there somewhere we can go to get a good look at what we’re getting into before we head into the caves?”

“We’re to the southeast, about half a mile from the colony border,” Farla answered, slipping past him and grabbing his arm as she went. She grabbed Keith with her free hand as she went by. “But up this way the hills turn into the cliffs and you can see from there.”

Tiselle caught Lance’s wrist and pulled him along behind them, as Acxa brought up the rear on her own since she was familiar with the area. Lance struggled and stumbled a bit as he followed, tripping over hidden vines and roots that snaked their way across the secret path the girls seemed to intuitively be able to pick out. Everything looked the same to him, it was just thick greenery in every direction, and he doubted he’d be able to find his own way back if he got separated.

And then the jungle ended, suddenly and without warning, leaving them at the edge of a precipice that would provide a very untimely death for anyone not careful enough in their travels.

“There,” Farla pushed a large fern leaf down a little so they could see, holding two of them like a fan to keep herself hidden. “There’s the market, and there below is the lake and the central command building.”

The old lake bed the colony sat in was basically a bowl with one shallow end, with the elegant, circular central command building situated in the middle of the deepest part. It was surrounded by water, as Acxa had said, connected to dry land by a bridge that led to its front doors. The rest of the colony was laid out in sections, each semicircle quarter a step up in elevation from the last like a theater with the domed command building on the low stage. Behind it, an obviously man-made waterfall spilled down the highest point of the cliffs.

“Wow,” Lance heard Keith murmur from beside him. “It’s actually pretty nice.”

“I don’t think Alteans even know how to make anything ugly,” James said from the other side of Keith.

It was on the tip of Lance’s tongue to spitefully say “have you met Lotor,” but there were three Altean women nearby who could far too easily murder him on the spot. He bit his tongue and nodded toward the back of the lake.

“The waterfall is to keep the water from stagnating?” He asked. “And I’m guessing your water treatment equipment is in the caves behind it and only reachable by authorized personnel.”

“Wow, careful,” James quipped. “Don’t you only get a quota of three smart things you’re allowed to say in a day?”

“Hey Griffin, how’s your crush on Adam going?” Lance retorted just loud enough for James and Keith to hear, crouching down to his knees to lean over the edge and look down. He spoke up louder for the others, pointing downwards. “It’s cool, as long as I say the dumb things with enough confidence nobody knows the difference. Is that the grate we’ll be coming out of down below us?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Keith’s head whip around to look at James, and heard the MFE pilot start sputtering a denial.

“Yes,” Farla nodded, crouching down and leaning out over the cliff a bit with Lance. “See how it’s half above the water? So there’s no threat of drowning getting to it like the others. But that will also put you close to the surface when you come out.”

“That’s where the waterfall comes in,” Lance answered, reaching over to punch Keith lightly in the shin and draw his attention away from James…who was notably turning an interesting shade of pink. “It’s churning up a lot of foam on the water, that should hide us long enough for us to dive deeper if we stay near it. Acxa, what are we doing once we’re in?”

“That’s where James comes in,” Lance felt Acxa lean over him a bit. “Look.”

She pointed to the Galra who were wandering around, looking as if they owned the place. Those who were off duty were meandering over in the market district, where black market dealers had set up stalls much like they had on the outpost. Some came and went from the houses down in the residential district, probably having taken over peoples homes for their own use once they’d cleared the place.

“They’re all over the town, but the only guards on duty at the command building are the four at the front door,” Acxa pointed out. “The closest I was ever able to get before now was up on the cliff, so I don’t know how many more are inside. But what I do know is that the building’s air conditioning system circulates fresh air from outside when it’s not in emergency lockdown, instead of scrubbing its own. One of the vent portals is in the back of the building, down low so it can be reached for regular maintenance.”

Much to Lance’s annoyance he looked over to find that Keith and James were still not paying attention, having a little back-and-forth that had nothing to do with the mission at hand.

“Well it’s not a normal break up,” Keith was saying sharply.

“They haven’t even seen each other in years,” James whispered back defensively. “Besides, _he’s_ the one flirting shamelessly with everyone under every sun, it’s not like I randomly showed up trying to tempt him away.”

“That’s not real flirting, that’s just how he is,” Keith returned. “And he’s not going to date a student or a subordinate anyway. And even if he was, he’s _not_ available.”

“First of all, I’m almost twenty-three and I’m not a student. Second of all, I have an upcoming promotion to Captain that kicks in at the end of next week,” James said angrily, forgetting to whisper. “You know, a rank higher than you? And third of all…even if I was planning on making a move on my boss’ ex, which is really fucking weird so I’m not, it’s nobody’s business because as of right now he’s still single!”

“No he’s not!”

“They _broke up_. Everybody knew about it!”

“They only sort-of did, it’s complicated!”

Keith was doing a very good job of being a stand-in for Shiro, with one small exception. Shiro was pretty in-control most of the time about most things, but Lance was pretty sure that if he were here right now he would probably push James off the cliff. Lance had seen him lose his patience with Slav, and that didn’t have the added punch of Adam being involved.

“Guys, guys,” Lance snapped his fingers for attention. He had only been poking fun, he hadn’t really thought James had a crush on Adam…that was an interesting development, but one they didn’t have time for right now. “Adam doesn’t date lower than a nine, eight if he’s desperate, James doesn’t qualify. Can you pay attention so we don’t all die today?”

They glared at each other, leaving Tiselle looking back and forth between them, completely lost regarding the argument she’d just witnessed. Lance reached over and caught James by his sleeve, pulling him around Keith and making him lean out so Acxa could point out the command building.

James leaned down to punch him between the shoulder blades when he got close. Which Lance supposed he at least partially deserved for sniping below the belt and possibly outing him as not totally on the straight side. But that made Keith punch James in the shoulder, and Lance had to drop completely to his knees and throw out both arms to keep anybody from falling over the cliff edge. Tiselle finally squeezed in between Keith and James, holding them apart.

“Maybe Farla and I should go in and you children can wait back with Ariella,” she suggested.

“ _Around the back_ ,” Acxa repeated loudly to shut them all up, pointing to the ledge that went around the perimeter of the building. “There’s a vent shaft. It closes up in emergencies, but as long as we’re not seen it should be open. You’re going to have to use those sonar sensors in your leg to map out where everyone is before we go inside.”

“And what’s the layout of the building once we are in there?” James asked, leaning further away from Keith just in case he decided to punch around Tiselle.

“The first and second floors are an outer ring of small, private offices with an inner hub of four triangular, auditorium-style meeting rooms,” Acxa answered. “Third floor is a research and development lab, kind of like Honerva’s lab back on the outpost. The top floor is the control center, from there we can control everything…the basic colony defenses, the communication lines, and any security video feeds. Including ones in the basement and mines.”

“So we go up, and then once we take the control center we decide how far down we have to go,” Keith surmised. “And we get in contact with the Atlas.”

“The air shafts are narrow,” Acxa warned, looking at the others. “I know Lance and I can fit, but it might be a squeeze for James and it will definitely be tight for Keith. They also aren’t exactly made for climbing through, so we can’t use them to get all the way up to the top floor. We’ll have to use the vent to get in and then work our way up the old-fashioned way.”

“We avoid elevators, and we take the stairs,” Keith ordered. “Lance, James, you two are our shooters, you hang back as we go and cover Acxa and I while we go in close. If we have to split up at any point, Lance, you’re with me and James, you’re with Acxa.”

Lance looked up at the sky, searching for signs of the Galra armada he knew would be hidden by the sunlight hitting the atmosphere. If he tried really hard he could see faint outlines here and there where cruisers reflected enough light to be noticeable, but most of them were designed to intentionally be dark and hard to see up in space.

“All right, let’s get going,” he encouraged, getting to his feet. “We may not have much time before they decide to blow up the planet.”

“Hold on a second.”

Lance felt Keith grab the collar of his armor and pull him back. Fingers hooked the top hem of his under armor, pulling it down a little so they could run across the back of his neck. Lance felt a shudder run down his spine, mentally flashing back to being in the quintessence field as Keith touched the spot where he had felt something bite him.

“You have a really weird mark here,” Keith told him. “It’s like a…black spot.”

“Yes, he had that when he came out of the quintessence field,” Acxa said, leaning over to look at it as well. “It was much worse then, it ran down along his spine. But it steadily got better while he was in the extractor pod, so I assume it’s a reaction to some kind of venom or something.”

“Uh, were you going to tell me this at some point?” Lance asked, reaching back to rub his neck. “Or were you just assuming that examining the back of your neck in the mirror is a thing people regularly do?”

“It was going away,” Acxa repeated. “I expected it to be gone by now. Does it hurt?”

“Well, no, I don’t even feel it,” Lance admitted. “But now that I know it’s there it’s going to bother me.”

“We’ll run a scan on you when this is all over,” Acxa promised just to keep them moving, motioning for Farla and Tiselle to lead the way. “When we’re _not_ chest deep in Galra.”

They fell back into the greenery, following the girls until the trees began to thin and started to give way to rocky, open ground. This was where they started to hurry, moving quickly to cover the short distance at a run, to duck into a low cave opening Lance never would have spotted on his own.

“Hey, what are these carvings?” Keith asked once they were inside, running his hands along rough, angular symbols on the walls. “They look like they were made the same way as the carvings in Blue’s cavern.”

“They’re directions,” Farla answered. “To the water purification cavern. They stay mostly invisible unless a worker does this.”

She rested a hand on the wall and concentrated, running quintessence through the rock. The symbols started to glow, making them clearer and easier to read without their flashlights.

“So the carvings where the Lions were found were definitely made by the Alteans who piloted them,” Lance reasoned, running his fingers along one of the symbols. “Maybe that’s why you could decipher them. Maybe seeing them jogged some memory of Zarkon’s about the language, he was probably able to read Altean. But how did Merla know to leave clues for you in her carvings about the exact night Shiro would crash?”

Keith was frowning hard at the symbols, Lance could see his brain working overtime. In all honesty, Keith was pretty terrible at most of the things they’d learned in school, but he definitely wasn’t stupid. Uneducated would be the word, but he could be a deep thinker when he really wanted to.

“Coming from Galra space, this planet is in the direction of Earth,” Keith said after a moment. “I guess…it’s possible Merla and Melenor came this way in the Blue Lion. If they were trying to make sure they weren’t followed, they could have taken a slight detour and gone through the Quantum Abyss. Time’s so warped there, the visions you see could be of your past or of your future. Maybe Merla saw the day Blue would wake up and calculated the date by a view of the stars she managed to get.”

“But if it only shows visions related to the people who are there, that means that somebody from the Garrison who was there when Shiro crashed would have to be carrying Merla’s or Melenor’s core,” Lance pointed out.

“That makes sense, though. Look at all of us,” Keith gestured between himself and Lance. “We were born all over the world, but we all gathered in the same place at the same time. If the Blue Lion called us to the Garrison, she could have called Merla or Melenor too. Or both. You know, there’s one woman who’s been around through most of this who we can prove has Altean DNA.”

He looked at Lance, who momentarily drew a blank. There was no way of knowing who on Earth actually had Altean genes without testing unless they already had a family tree with it. The only family they knew of definitively were the McClains, and there was only one woman in his family who had been involved in so much of the fighting.

“Hold on, back up,” Lance threw up his hands in denial. “You are not hinting that Veronica might be the reincarnation of Merla or Melenor.”

“Melenor most likely,” Keith said with a slight shrug. “You saw how fast she took Allura under her wing, and how close they are. Melenor did pilot Blue, and that Sincline ship did open up to Veronica pretty fast. It makes sense if she’s got an Altean core like Allura and Romelle do.”

“Yeah, but do you know how freaking weird that would be?” Lance asked, shuddering. “That’s saying I was married to my sister in a past life.”

“Lance, she wasn’t your sister in that past life. And honestly, she might not be Melenor at all. I’m just saying, a lot of coincidence fits…you’re the only two in your family who came to the Garrison, there might be a reason she did too.”

“Well, maybe she’s Merla,” Lance tried. “Merla was an alchemist, right? And that whole thing with the Atlas transforming happened while Veronica was on the bridge.”

“Veronica wasn’t there when Shiro landed,” Keith disagreed. “She told us before that she didn’t know Shiro was alive until Sam came back to Earth.”

“Well if you’re going to be picky, our choices are pretty slim,” Lance pointed out. “First, you need someone who was at the Garrison the same time as the rest of us. Second, you need someone who was an officer at the time, because only officers were at Shiro’s crash site. And third, you need someone who not only survived the invasion, but who was on the bridge when the Atlas transformed to trigger it with alchemy. Dude, literally the only person who fits all of those requirements is Iverson.”

Keith and Lance looked at each other, and Lance had to fight back a laugh he felt bubbling up.

“Oh my God, you’re right,” Keith said in a loud whisper, trying and failing to hold back a snort of amusement. “He was the only one who…wait. Wait, no, he’s _not_ the only one.”

“What do you mean he’s not the only one?” Lance snorted. “Yes he is. He fits all the criteria. I never pictured him as a delicate elven lady, but…”

“No, there’s one more,” Keith insisted, counting off on his fingers. “At the Garrison while we were there. On the bridge when the Atlas transformed. And at Shiro’s crash site. I know he was there because I saw the officers who arrived before they put on the clean suits, while I was setting out the explosive charges. Curtis Duchesne was there.”

“Why was he there?” Lance made a face. “I think he’d only just become a Major at that point, everyone who was at that crash site would have been really high up.”

“I heard Shiro talking to him over Black’s comm lines, I was in his hold but I still had my helmet mic,” Keith admitted, not looking the least bit guilty to have been eavesdropping. “He hinted that Duchesne is Special Forces, that being a communications officer is his cover for passing intel. I bet if we check, we’ll find out Duchesne was also in the room when the Garrison got the transmission right after Shiro, Sam and Matt were found by the Galra.”

Lance frowned, looking at the carvings.

“Adam and Duchesne were pretty friendly,” he supposed. “I was in Adam’s office a few times when he stopped by. And Blaytz and Merla _were_ married…I wonder if Shiro’s got stronger competition than we thought.”

“Curtis and Adam were always close. Close enough that Curtis was trying to dethrone Sanda long before you guys got back, because of what happened with the first wave defense.”

James’ voice came from right behind them, and Lance realized the others had moved on but were standing further in the cave waiting for them. James must have overheard them when he came back to fetch them.

“Yeah?” Lance prompted curiously. He had never been given much information about the day Adam had supposedly died, and as time went on asking questions had begun to feel more and more inappropriate.

“He was in the command center, running the comms to the first wave pilots,” James confirmed. “He was always right there with Iverson and Sanda, even though a lot of other people supposedly outranked him. We always thought there was something weird about him. Sam wasn’t allowed to tell us anything about what happened that day, so once the siege settled in a few weeks later we had Ina hack Curtis’ accounts to get the recordings of the communication transmissions.”

“What’d you find?” Lance asked in spite of himself. There was so much that went on at the Garrison that was on a need-to-know basis, but the people who decided who needed to know weren’t always the most fair in giving out information.

“Nothing, we got caught,” James admitted. “Curtis’ files use encryption that nothing else at the Garrison uses, she set something off while she was trying to crack it and he found us in his office. On the record, he told us there was nothing of interest for us to know and that even if there was it was above our rank.”

“And off the record?” Keith asked.

“He warned us not to completely trust Sanda,” James answered.

He gestured for them to come on so they wouldn’t hold the others up anymore and the three of them finally left the cave wall behind. Still, they stayed back, letting the three Altean women get ahead of them.

“Adam helped design and build the MFE fighters, he was always fighting to try and implement Galra tech with ours instead of Altean,” James said as they walked. “All we had was the craft Captain Shirogane had crashed in, but even just from that he already knew that Galra technology was built to be brutal. He knew our planes and thermobarics were useless against them, so did the other pilots.”

“Then why did they go out?” Lance frowned. “Don’t get me wrong, I get the whole “chain of command” thing you love so much, but the Garrison had its particle barrier, there was no point in them going on a suicide mission.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a suicide mission,” James answered. His jaw tightened as he said it, and his expression turned to one of anger. “Ina, Ryan, Nadia and I were told that if we were ever attacked, that we needed to get to the hangars and wait for orders to take off. The first round of fighters to go out would be a decoy round…their job was to lull the attacking ships into thinking we didn’t have anything better. They were also already linked up to the command center with sensors and scanners that the MFEs didn’t have because it just didn’t work with the Altean tech. The plan was that the two units would go out there, grab information on the invading force’s weapon systems, and then fall back.

“After that, the MFEs were supposed to launch to cover their retreat, and to try and use some of what their planes picked up to hopefully bring down one or two of the bigger ships before returning to base. At that point we could use the first wave’s intel to start upgrading the MFEs with measures that could specifically counter the weapons the invaders favored.”

“But the pilots got shot down before you guys could be ordered out,” Keith concluded.

“No,” James said angrily. “We were never ordered out. They were supposed to be within enemy reach for two minutes at the most, to get scans on what kind of firepower they had. We were prepared for one or two of them to go down, just because Sam had warned us how many strikers there could be, but most of them would have made it back if we’d been sent out to cover them. They’d already hit the seven-minute mark when we realized Sanda wasn’t going to call them back.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Lance almost tripped over his own foot as he tried to turn toward James while walking. “She just left them out there?”

“She wanted to gauge how long it would take a Galra cruiser to completely annihilate our standard air defenses. They thought they were coming back, she knew they weren’t. Apparently this was one of the methods that was in the government playbook for a full-scale alien invasion. Curtis knew it was a thing, but didn’t realize she was playing that card until she wouldn’t give the order for us to launch. She told us later it was because we were still inexperienced cadets and the MFEs were untested prototypes, but he warned us to be careful of anything she ordered us to do, and to be wary of attack orders from Iverson.”

“Iverson?” Keith repeated. “Why Iverson?”

“Iverson obeyed Sanda’s orders to send the pilots out in the first place,” James shrugged. “Even after Sam warned them that there was no good intel they could get and that they were doomed if they went out there. He obeyed Sanda’s order to not give us the green light to go, and he obeyed the order to not call the others back. He had the authority to bring them back in and argue the point with Sanda later, he didn’t. He left them out there.”

Lance looked over at Keith and saw the other Paladin looking back at him in the shadows, both of them thinking the same thing. They now needed to be very careful about bringing Adam back to Earth. He was angry, he was spiteful, and he was a living witness to the fact that some higher ups still at the Garrison had been accessories to the murder of Garrison soldiers rather than just listening to the intel from Sam Holt.

He was going to have a target on his back as soon as some higher Garrison brass learned he was alive.

“If you knew Sanda was no good, why did you still follow her?” Keith asked, looking back to James. “Why did you still keep taking orders from her?”

James stopped walking and turned to look at them in the dark, and Lance thought he looked…hurt. It wasn’t the kind of emotion he was used to seeing on James’ face, out of place on features that always looked arrogant and confident.

“You both know what it’s like to come in after a Galra attack and try to clean up the mess,” he said softly. “But do you have any idea what it’s like to watch a world burn? The Galra didn’t attack blindly, they took out governments and big cities. They brought down our communications, they cut us off from each other and left only small, unconnected pockets.

“My little sister’s elementary school was at ground zero for one of the cruiser attacks, she didn’t come home. Two units flew out in the first wave, one led by Adam and the other led by my father. Dad didn’t come home that day either. My mom made it to the front gates of the Garrison before she collapsed, but she had to be put into an induced coma because of the extent of her burns. She’s still unresponsive in a hospital bed today. What were we supposed to do? We were eighteen and nineteen years old and we’d never been into battle before. We took Curtis’ warning to be careful about where certain orders might leave us and we fell into line.”

Lance felt a familiar wave of guilt, even though he’d long since learned he shouldn’t. There was no reason for him to feel guilty that his family had survived and others had not, but he still did.

“Sorry man,” he said sincerely. “We didn’t know.”

“At least I survived it all, a lot of people didn’t,” James answered. “My dad took over leading that unit right around the time Adam took over Captain Shirogane’s. They were buddies, he’d have dinner at our house sometimes. So no, I don’t “have a crush” on Adam. He’s just a surviving piece of what life on Earth used to be.”

He sped up a little to catch up to the others. Lance stayed back, letting him get some distance after that and feeling kind of like a jerk. He could tell Keith felt the same way, he was uncharacteristically quiet even for Keith for the rest of their trip through the caves.

At length they could see light ahead and turned off their flashlights so they wouldn’t be seen, quietly approaching a spot in the rock wall where water moved through a thick metal grate. Acxa dug through the tools she’d brought for the cutter and got to work, carefully cutting the bars at quick, short intervals in an attempt not to make enough noise to draw attention.

It took a bit, and Lance’s patience was starting to run low by the time Acxa lifted the bottom of the grate out of the water and tossed it on the ground next to them.

“Farla, Tiselle, stay back a little so you’re not seen and wait in case we have to retreat or we send any freed captives your way,” she commanded, pulling the helmet of her armor on and activating the screen. “The rest of you…as soon as you’re past the grate the ledge falls away and the water gets deeper. Dive straight down and go to the right to try and stay camouflaged by the waterfall. We’re going to go all the way around to the back and then come up at the back of the building.”

She slipped into the water, which now Lance could see was clean and clear, making it even more important that they stay deep and stay hidden. He followed next, maneuvering under the remains of the grate and swimming downward once he was past the shelf.

The lake bottom was smooth and empty, with occasional comb marks in the sandy bottom indicating that it was regularly cleaned. The water was so clear Lance could see all the way across, which was why he noticed the sudden movement of shadow. He had enough experience snorkeling on Caribbean beaches to pinpoint that the flicker of sunlight reflecting through the water over there was caused by something breaking the water’s surface.

Two somethings, and they glided effortlessly through the water toward the group. They looked to Lance to be a weird mix between leopard seals and alligators.

“Incoming!” He warned everyone over the comms. “Acxa, I thought you said there were no animals on this planet!”

“There weren’t!” Acxa exclaimed, diving to avoid having her head taken off by one of the creatures. Their bite was wide and their teeth were sharp, not a mouth he wanted to tussle with. “The Galra must have brought them in to keep anyone from escaping from the command building by water!”

One of them came at him and he ducked it, but it moved too fast. It twisted in the water and he felt it bite down on his arm, its teeth fortuitously clamping onto his armor and unable to penetrate. But that seemed to just make it angry and it started to spin, flipping him around in a way that made him sure his arm was going to come out of its socket. It pulled him away from the others, and out away from the shielding ripples of the waterfall.

Lance could hear the others yelling his name, and then felt the other creature slam into him from behind as they both moved in on the prey that had effectively been separated from the group. He could feel the vibrations in his arm of teeth grinding against armor, trying unsuccessfully to crack through, jarring his twisted arm farther.

It hurt to do, but he braced his feet against what could arguably be called the animal’s shoulders and kicked hard, fighting his aching arm free. As he started swimming upwards, he felt the other one grab his leg and start to pull him down, rolling the same way the first had.

He finally managed to get the gun off his shoulder and fire two shots, the first one going wide in the flurry of activity. The second hit its mark, injuring the thing’s leg and making it let go. Lance hit his boosters, forcing himself up to the surface where he came up a few yards from the bridge. He closed the distance in a few desperate strokes, pulling himself up out of reach and flipping open his helmet screen to suck in fresh air.

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” He whispered into his mic, trying not to move his lips as the Galra guarding the command center door saw him and began to approach with weapons drawn. “But guys, I suggest you consider this a diversion and get out of the water before those thing come after you!”

“What’s happening up there?” He heard Keith asking as he quickly muted his mic, slowly getting to his feet and raising his hands in surrender as the four Galra came closer. A quick glance behind him found four more coming from the other side of the bridge. Lance wondered if he was any safer here than in the water.

“Drop your weapon!” The closest soldier demanded. Lance complied, pulling the gun off completely and dropping it on the bridge. He kicked it away, sending it sliding over to stop in front of them. “How did you get here?”

“You know, I ask myself the same question pretty often,” Lance said tiredly. “You think you know where your life is going but then BAM! You’re in a galaxy far, far away on a planet you never heard of with eight guns pointed at you and sealigators in the water.”

“Get on your knees, smartass,” the guard demanded, kicking the gun out of his way and approaching with his own weapon raised.

“You could at least buy me dinner fir-ack!”

One of the guards had come up behind him and kicked him hard in the back of the calf, dropping him down hard to his knees.

“Take his helmet off,” the guard in charge commanded.

Lance only had a split second to make his decision. As he felt his helmet being pulled off he swore softly and let go of his camouflage, letting the red and lavender colors bleed quickly back in.

“Looks like another one of those guards,” a second Galra in front of him commented. “I thought we caught all of them last time they attacked, how many of them are still hiding out in that damn jungle?”

“We should have all of them, we matched them all up to the colony records,” the leader grunted.

Lance didn’t know who they were talking about, but he decided to hazard a guess. Altean guards hiding out in the jungles and making attacks were most likely soldiers guarding the colony. He didn’t know all of the details, but he’d have to wing it.

“What…of course I’m a guard!” He exclaimed, doing his best to sound offended. “Well, technically still a cadet, but I’m almost there! I got to the water on my own, didn’t I? So there. Check and mate.”

The guards looked unimpressed. The two in front looked at each other.

“I dunno a lot about these long-eared weirdos, but he looks like a kid to me,” one commented.

“It’s hard to tell, they’re all so small and skinny. But I know the older ones have deeper voices. Either he’s a kid or he’s really a girl.”

“Hey! My voice is just fine!” Lance defended, honestly a little bit insulted this time. “We have a lot of tenors in my family, okay?”

“Somebody take this idiot down to the holding cells with the other guards,” the leader commanded. “The kid’s at least a cadet, he wouldn’t be armored or carrying this kind of gun otherwise. I don’t want to risk putting him in with the less supervised workers.”

Lance was hauled to his feet and marched across the bridge. He tried to search the water for the others without looking like he was doing so, but if they were still in there they were likely either hidden under the waterfall or had wisely escaped back through the grate. Those animals were still swimming lazily around down there, and now he could see two more sunning themselves at the water’s surface on the other side of the lake.

Well, at least one of them was about to make it into the building. Unarmed and on his way to a cell, but inside.

Lance was halfway to the door when his vision flickered. For a few heartbeats he was no longer on the bridge but sitting in Red’s pilot seat, her viewscreen booting up and overlays coming up. He could hear her radio, the transmission she picked up coming through with the terrifyingly familiar voice of Honerva.

She was ordering ships to leave. Half of the armada was preparing to jump. He had to focus hard to pay attention to what Red was showing him so he didn’t get all the details, but he got that part.

Then he was back on the bridge, blinking furiously as the darkness of Red’s cockpit was once again replaced by bright sunlight. Lance knew what that was, he had reached out to Red like that before, while they had been prisoners on a Galra ship using their Lions to fight without them actually inside. But that connection took concentration he didn’t have right now, so it was no wonder it had been short.

_Was that in real time?_ Lance thought to himself, looking up at the sky. _Are you trying to tell me some of those Galra are leaving?_

Sure enough, he could see ships up there starting to move. Their motion made the sunlight reflect off them differently, in many cases making them much more visible. Lance saw an arc of flashes across the sky as a large number of the ships jumped at once, leaving the planet behind.

“Finally, there you are!”

Lance’s gaze followed the Galran soldiers’ to the front door of the command building, which had just opened to allow Acxa to exit. She was in her half-Galra disguise and had managed to steal and hastily don armor that matched the guards holding him at gunpoint.

“…why is he wet?”

The guards looked at each other, then looked at Acxa. Lance held his breath, waiting to see if Honerva had put her on the hit list as well. There had been no way for Honerva to know that Acxa was part of the escape, or even that she was still alive, she had only actually seen Lance and Adam during the chaos at the outpost.

“…General,” the leader finally greeted, looking confused. “Apologies, I was unaware you were here. And he’s wet because we fished him out of the water.”

“What?” Lance sputtered. “You didn’t even see me until I got _myself_ out of the water!”

“You tried to escape in the water?” Acxa asked, ignoring Lance’s outburst and looking at him imperiously. “Even after I warned you that you’d never get away? No wonder your kind are almost extinct, you don’t have the brains the gods gave a yalmor.”

She turned to the guard leader, doing a very good impression of being extremely annoyed.

“I brought him in last night. He’s gifted, but not enough to drain a useful amount of quintessence. Haggar decided he would be of better use if I brought him here to test some of the technology we can’t crack and see if it will activate for him.” Acxa looked down her nose at Lance, then gave the Galra soldiers a look of disgust. “I had him held in one of the offices, but apparently your people can’t even keep a barely-skilled teenager under control. He even managed to get one of the guns we brought along because your sorry excuses for guards didn't lock them up right.”

“I’m sorry General, but I wasn’t made aware of any testing,” the guard frowned. “I wasn’t told you’d be arriving at all. I’m afraid I have to get some verification from Haggar, then I can send you down to the druids.”

“The druids,” Acxa repeated, her eyes widening slightly. Lance understood the sentiment. Why were there druids here if all the gifted kids who were old enough to learn alchemy had been taken already? “Of course.”

The guard stepped away, activating his comm. Lance shared a sideways look with Acxa, knowing that now they were both in trouble instead of just one of them.

“Kailuk, patch me through to Haggar’s ship.”

There was a pause, and Lance eyed his gun on the ground. He wasn’t cuffed and nobody was holding him, and the blue armor he wore was the newer version the others had brought with them. He might not have his bayard, but he had his shield, between that and the armor he could probably take a few hits if necessary. He could get the gun if he rolled, maybe take out four of the guards. If Acxa could take out the other four, they could make a run for it, maybe even cause a big enough diversion as they went that Keith and James could get to the control room.

“You can’t get anyone at all? Not even one of her druids?” The guard was saying. “No, it’s not the storms, the interference from them doesn’t reach this far. They’re probably ignoring us, we’re not _important_ enough to respond to quickly. Nevermind.”

He came back, looking more than a little irritated.

“Sorry, I can’t get in contact to verify,” he said to Acxa. “There’s no way I can give you access to anything here. You’re going to have to take him back in and hold him until Haggar gets back to us, I’ll post two guards at the door to the office you put him in.”

Lance knew they were about to be put in exactly the position they wanted to be in, but he also now knew there were other Altean soldiers being held here somewhere. That meant potentially more fighters to help them out, and at the very least it meant people who needed to be freed. He looked over at Acxa, trying to convey that with his expression.

“I’d really prefer it if you just let me go,” he lamented. “But I guess the offices is better than where the other soldiers are.”

“A lot better,” the guard snorted. “So I suggest you shut your mouth while you still have the privilege.”

Acxa caught his look and he saw her perk up slightly at the news that others were alive. She caught herself, letting out an exaggerated deep breath of exasperation.

“He hasn’t shut his mouth since we first brought him from here,” she told them. “Honestly, if I have to wait for Haggar to make contact anyway, you may as well throw him in with the others. The less babysitting we have to do the better.”

“Now that’s something I can definitely help you with,” the guard agreed, motioning to another. “Take him down and lock him with the others. Make sure you put him separate so the druids know he’s not for them to use.”

Not for them to use. That sounded so foreboding.

“Hands behind your back,” Acxa ordered, activating a glowing set of wrist restraints.

Lance did as he was told and she put them on him, but he could feel that she intentionally left them loose. He also felt her press something into his hand but couldn’t tell what it was. He quickly tucked it up into his vambrace, hiding it and leaving his hands visibly empty as she moved away.

“I’m going to go visit the base Commander,” she told the guard, stepping back as another Galra pressed his weapon to Lance’s back. “I’ll continue to try getting the authorization I need up in the control center with her.”

One of the Galra opened the doors and Lance was marched inside, through a short, straight corridor that split into a curved fork. He was turned right, walked past office doors marked with plates stating the names of the Alteans who had once worked in them. To his left were doors marked as conference room auditoriums, as Acxa had told them. Lance was taken about a quarter of the way around the building, into a small elevator.

The ride downward was made in silence. Two floors, according to the writing on the labels, which meant he would be in the secure area.

He was so used to being taken places as a Galra prisoner he half-expected the doors to open and let them out into a dark, purple-lit hallway, but all he saw when they stepped out of the elevator was more sleek, Altean design. The halls were no longer curving here, the lower floors built at more even angles and everything laid out in an easier grid design. It was very similar to the bunker, hallway after hallway lined with open doors that showed empty rooms.

Except rather than being permanent living spaces, these rooms had nothing except some benches lining the walls. These were safe rooms, meant for people to hunker down and wait out a temporary threat, not rooms made with luxury or comfort in mind. Lance lost count of how many they passed before they stopped and he was shoved into one of the open doorways.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” one guard advised him as he pressed a hand to the door pad and the door slid closed with a soft _thunk_.

It was dark in here. Lance knelt carefully down in the middle of the floor, trying to remember where in the room he was standing so he didn’t slam against any of the benches as he let himself sink down to lay on his back. He curled up his legs and rolled up his hips, maneuvering his bound hands from behind him to in front. Once he was able, he got back up and began feeling out in front of him until he hit the wall.

As he suspected, he eventually felt his way to a door control pad that was on the interior of the room. He didn’t have high hopes that it would react to him after seeing the guards use the one outside, and he wasn’t surprised that nothing happened when he pressed his hand to it. The building had obviously been keyed to respond only to Galra.

“I guess it’s a good thing I know how to learn, then,” he muttered.

He sat back down on the floor with his back to the door, fighting with the loose cuffs until he managed to get one hand free. When that was done he unclipped his breastplate, feeling around inside it for the things that were taped there.

When they’d decided to walk into a Galra-occupied colony, Lance had known he and Keith didn’t exactly have a great track record as far as things going right. He wasn’t exactly the key strategist of the group, but his time spent in the cells on the outpost had made him stop and take stock of what might be useful if he was caught again.

There wasn’t a lot that would fit in his armor, so he’d had to be very picky. Anything that couldn’t be hidden under his vambraces or breastplate would be taken, and it had been. He had no gun anymore, and he had no helmet. Which meant he had no contact with the others.

But what he did have was a glove Adam had shown him, one that the older pilot had left behind when he’d gone with Lotor. It was like the one James carried, made from Galra prosthetic tech. Lance peeled the tape from it and tugged it on, making a face at how much bigger it was on him than on Adam.

Reaching up, Lance put the gloved hand on the doorpad. Dim blue lights turned on in the room.

“Awesome,” he murmured, flexing his fingers and looking at the glove for a moment before turning back to the task at hand.

He had a length of cord wrapped around his forearm, having gotten the idea from some of those emergency rope bracelets he’d seen in a sports outfitter once. He didn’t know how to braid it into a bracelet so he’d just wrapped it around his arm, and he left that there for the moment. A small flashlight was taped in the breastplate, next to a small firestarter. It wasn’t like the lighters used on Earth, this was a little device that emitted sparks when squeezed, and Lance knew from experience it delivered just enough of a shock to cause surprise and buy a few seconds of time.

And, of course, Keith’s sketch of him with the Red Lion was there. Keith didn’t actually know Lance had it, but Lance wasn’t going anywhere without it.

He put his breastplate and vambrace back on, then reached into the other one to pull out the small item Acxa had passed to him. It was a communicator.

“Nice,” he murmured, hooking it on his ear as he got up off the floor.

He didn’t try to contact anyone yet. Up in the corner of the ceiling was a small dome that was undoubtedly a security camera, and though he doubted anyone was actually watching him right now they might play back the footage when they found he’d escaped. He didn’t want them to realize he was working with anybody.

After pressing his ear against the door for a few minutes and hearing nothing, Lance opened it up and turned out the light, peeking up and down the hall before stepping out. He sealed up the door and activated his shield just in case, slowly creeping down the hallway.

There were three more doors that were closed. He picked the nearest one and hit the panel, ducking to the side as it slid open. Peeking around the edge of the doorway, he looked into the darkness and found himself met with the surprised faces of about fifteen Altean men and women blinking at the light spilling in.

“Uh, hi,” he greeted, straightening up and looking around. He saw a lot of injuries here, some of them fresh from what was probably new capture, some of them scars on skin that probably hadn’t seen the light of day in almost four years. “Not to rush you or anything, but you all might want to get moving right now if you’re going to have any chance of escaping before the Galra get here.”

“Who are you?” A man with dark skin and a thick moustache that reminded Lance of Coran asked, surging to his feet and beginning to help a weaker woman at his side up as well. “What’s going on? Are you from Colony Two?”

“No, and while I’d love to have that conversation with you right now I need you to just believe that I’m a friend and tell me if there’s somebody here who’s in charge,” Lance answered, stepping back out of the way as the Alteans started to leave the room. “Is there a Captain here? Or a Commander or General, whatever you guys use?”

“The General is in another room,” a blue-haired woman answered. She was one of the badly scarred, but from the way she held herself Lance got the feeling she had given twice the pain she’d gotten before she went down. “I’m not sure which.”

“I guess we’ll find out then,” Lance supposed, heading to the next door.

He opened it but didn’t stop, moving on to the next and opening that one as well before jogging down to the end of the hall to look around the corner and make sure nobody was coming yet. By the time he’d made his way back, the Alteans from the first room were already helping others out of the second and third. Lance started to ask again who was in charge, but the question was answered for him when he spotted a face he knew he would never forget.

She wasn’t the biggest or tallest in the group, but the wine-colored hair, the aqua eyes, the bright green facial marks…Lance knew this woman was the powerhouse here without needing any confirmation. The only question was whether she was still a bottom tier genocidal maniac.

“General Hira.” He called for her attention, and his suspicion was confirmed when she turned toward his voice and everyone around her quieted.

Hira stood tall as she broke away from the others to meet him halfway down the hall, even though she walked with a noticeable limp from some kind of break that hadn’t healed properly. That made sense, if all of the adults here on the colony ungifted, nobody in those rooms would have been able to heal any injuries.

“You’re not one of ours,” Hira observed when she reached him, looking him over. “We appreciate the aid, but I’m afraid I have no choice but to be suspicious. Your armor is definitely Altean but it’s not any design of ours, and your colors are…suspect.”

Well, this Hira was at least more tactful than the one they’d encountered in the alternate reality. Lance was beginning to recognize a few other faces here as well, ones that had shot at him and who Shiro’s alternate reality version Sven had almost died saving him from. None of them had quite the same air about them as their alternate versions.

“You mean I have Honerva’s marks,” Lance didn’t have time to beat around the bush. The words left a bad taste in his mouth but they were the truth. “Believe me, I don’t like it either. But I’m not some kind of spy for her if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m here with General Acxa.”

Hira’s lips pursed and she regarded him thoughtfully for a few moments. He knew she was trying to decide whether he was trustworthy or not, but he didn’t have time for this.

“Acxa,” he called softly, reaching up to activate the communicator. “Keith, Griffin. Are you guys there?”

“Lance!” Keith’s voice came first, quiet, as if trying not to be heard. “Where are you? What happened?”

“I’m down in the basement, working my Paladin magic and just generally being awesome,” Lance answered, glancing up at Hira. “Is Acxa with you?”

“No, we had to separate,” Acxa’s voice came next, likely delayed because she’d had to excuse herself and find somewhere she wouldn’t be overheard. “I’m at the command center, trying to get us an opportunity to strike. The other two are hidden a floor down.”

“Well I just found us some backup, but you’re going to have to vouch for me,” Lance replied, turning on the speaker so the couple Alteans standing nearby could hear. “Got a call for you, General Hira.”

“Hira?” Acxa exclaimed in surprise, accidentally getting louder.

“Acxa!” Hira’s face twisted into an expression of relief. “We were starting to lose hope that anyone would come from the outside.”

“It’s been a hard few decaphoebs,” Acxa answered. “Listen, there’s no time. The entire colony is swarming with Galra, and a Galra armada is up in the skies waiting to turn the planet into dust. Lotor is alive and he _will_ come, but in the meantime we have to do whatever we can to take the central command.”

“We have about forty soldiers here,” Hira replied, looking back over those gathered in the halls. “Not all of them are in top form, but they’ll do what they can.”

“Get to the elevator shafts,” Acxa advised. “Keith, James, I’m going to cause a temporary power outage. The backup systems will kick on but everything up here will have to reboot, cameras and security will be down for about five doboshes. You’ll be able to get to the armory and start retaking the building before it’s back up. I’ll try to keep everything down up here as long as I can, but once it’s back up we have to take out the Galra up here whether we’re ready or not if we don’t want them transmitting an SOS.”

“I’m not coming up,” Lance decided, looking back down the hall. “If security’s going to be down, I have to go find out why there are druids here.”

“Whoa, wait, she’s got druids here?” James asked. “Like those two creepy ones that kept wiping your memory? You can’t face off against those freaks alone, Lance.”

“I’m not facing off against any of them, I’m spying on them,” Lance corrected. “Anya and Karlor had a weird kind of connection with Honerva, if the rest of the druids do too they might just alert her even if we take the command center. And she’s the one who will give the order to blow the planet.”

“It’s true, there are druids here,” Hira confirmed. “They come sometimes and take one or two of us, anyone who goes with them doesn’t come back. But these druids aren’t Galra, they’re people from the colony. Gifteds who have turned against us. Or who are perhaps being controlled somehow, they don’t seem to recognize us when we speak to them.”

“Maybe she messed with their memories too,” Lance suggested. “Either way, I have to see what they’re up to.”

“I’ll go along,” Hira volunteered. “Romador…you’re in command. General Acxa is above, she’s going to kill power. You all will head to the armory during the reboot sequence, and then move to retake the building from the first floor up.”

“Yes ma’am,” the Altean with the thick moustache saluted.

“I don’t like this,” Keith ground out on the line. “But I obviously can’t stop you. So be careful, and don’t do anything stupid.”

“Keith, I’m in the basement of one of the better protected buildings in a colony overrun with guys who want to murder people who look like me, and I came here voluntarily,” Lance reminded him. “I think I already reached peak stupid for the day.”

“No you haven’t,” Keith and James said in unison.

“Thanks for the support,” Lance sighed. “I gotta go get into position before the power goes out. I’ll let you know what I find.”

He disconnected and Hira motioned for him to follow, heading in the opposite direction of the others. Lance kept expecting to turn a corner and stumble into more Galra, but the whole place was eerily empty. Empty and dark, with most of the lights off. They reached a double doors with a sign reading that it was the medical bay and Lance used his glove to open the door, but there was nothing but darkness beyond.

Darkness, and stale air. As they stepped through the doors they both had to strangle off coughs, stepping back to wait a few moments for the fresh air of the hallway to rush in. The air recyclers weren’t on down here.

“There’s no way anybody’s working down here without suffocating,” Lance whispered. “Maybe they set up shop somewhere else.”

“No, they always came in this direction, and this is the only thing here,” Hira answered.

The soft whine of life support throughout the rest of the basement quieted then, a sound Lance hadn’t noticed until it was gone, leaving everything more silent and dark on top of it as the lights went out.

“Acxa must have killed the power. You said this place has backups?” Lance asked.

“Yes. They kick in after thirty ticks.”

Lance counted heartbeats. It felt like forever before the lights came back on in the hall, but the medical bay remained dark and stagnant. The settings had likely been manually turned off, then.

“I can’t breathe, ugh.”

Lance finally gave in and turned on the lights himself, tensing in preparation to be attacked. But there was nobody in the empty waiting room, and no sounds coming from farther on in the labs. He hit a few buttons on the power pad until he found the option he wanted, and a moment later the quiet hum of the life support systems kicked on.

They moved slowly forward, wary of being trapped down here with no exit even though Lance couldn’t fathom anyone being left alive in here. The couple of private examination rooms were empty, a storage closet they came across still had all of it’s supplies sealed and tagged in preparation for a potential surge of injuries in a lockdown emergency. Nothing in the medical bay seemed to have ever been touched, it was all still pristine and unused.

Because Honerva had come in under the guise of a friend, Lance knew. There had been no time for the people of the colony to hide or fight back, because she’d come in the name of Lotor and led them to slaughter with lies.

There was one issue though, but Lance supposed it had to do with the age of the place; the walls and ceiling in a lot of spots looked corroded or rusted, as if the metal hadn’t been cared for properly in a very long time. In some places it was chipping or peeling away entirely.

Lance pushed open the swinging double doors that led into the open emergency room, and both he and Hira came to a grinding halt. It was a circular room with healing pods lining the wall, healing pods that weren’t empty. Lance glanced over at Hira, who shrugged to indicate she didn’t know what was going on, and the two crept quietly forward.

The first pod had a child. She was probably four years old at the most, just a tiny thing with light brown skin and reddish hair. Hira looked at the readouts on the pod and shook her head.

“I don’t understand why she’s in there,” she whispered. “She’s not in a cryo freeze, she’s healthy. She’s just being kept asleep. Are there others?”

Lance moved on to the next pod, but this one had condensation on the glass. As he reached up to wipe it away it felt cold, almost frigid, as if all the heat had been sapped from the air around it. The layer of dampness on the glass wiped away to reveal an almost skeletal face.

“Whoa!” He exclaimed, much louder than he meant to be as he jumped back. “Holy crow, yeah there are more…but I think they’re dead.”

He moved on to the next one, and the next, swiping away the condensation so he could look. Four pods held bodies, all of them with skin drawn and taut in a way that made him think of the mummies he’d seen in the history museum. The pod settings definitely weren’t set for healing, it looked more like they were meant to preserve.

A hissing sound made him jump again as Hira startled him by opening the pod with the little girl. She groaned softly and fell forward into the older Altean’s arms, and Hira hoisted her up against her.

“If they’re dead, then there’s nothing we can do for them,” she answered, coming over to stand beside him. “We should go. We can come back for a better look later.”

Lance started to nod, but a sharp pain in the back of his neck made him momentarily lock up. It passed, but not before something started to move in the pods. Each had a small black cloud that had been hiding away out of sight before, and now they all coalesced into solid black shapes drifting around behind the glass.

“Oh no,” Lance blurted out. “No, no, that’s a big old no. We’ve got to go.”

“What are they?” Hira asked, taking a step closer. “What are they doing?”

The creatures suddenly began slamming against the glass almost angrily, repeatedly hitting with enough force that two of them started to crack. Lance knew they probably couldn’t do much for too long on their own, but he had seen enough horror movies that he thought he had an idea of why those bodies were in there.

One of the creatures stopped slamming against the glass, dissipating instead back into a black cloud and beginning to disappear into the nose and mouth of the body in its pod. That was all the confirmation Lance needed.

“Come on!” He yelled, grabbing HIra’s arm and taking off down the hallway. “We need to go! Give me the girl!”

Hira was as strong as any Altean, but her limp was throwing her off balance and slowing her down. Lance took the unconscious girl out of her arms and poured on speed, slamming through the two-way swinging doors and flying back down the hall to the waiting room. He beat Hira to the doors and skidded to a stop, his gloved hand hovering over the doorpad.

She was, fortunately, only a few long strides behind. As she made it out the doors Lance slammed the doorpad to close them, and Hira gave him hasty instructions on how to set off a pathogen threat and lock it down. The light turned red, effectively sealing the medical bay up, and Lance grabbed Hira’s hand and started running again.

It wasn’t safe down here. He knew it wasn’t safe.

They passed the empty holding rooms and finally reached the elevator, and Lance shoved Hira inside before slipping in himself and beginning to slam the buttons. He didn’t care who was waiting on the upper floors. He didn’t care if there were a thousand Galra guards. He didn’t care if the whole freaking armada had come down to the surface. All he knew was that every instinct in his body was screaming for him to get out of that basement.

“What’s going on?” Hira panted, leaning against the wall. It had been far too long since she’d seen excessive physical activity thanks to her confinement. “What just happened back there?”

“I don’t know,” Lance answered, dropping down to his knees as the elevator started to go up. “But I know I’ve seen those black things before. Those things come from the quintessence field, the deeper part called the rift.”

He set the little girl on the elevator floor, lying her face down and supporting her with one arm. His hands trembled as he reached up to pull the back of her collar down, dreading what he suspected he was going to see. His stomach dropped when the back of her neck was revealed, a jagged black mark there that ran down under her shirt and probably down along her spine.

“What is _that_?” Hira asked in a horrified whisper.

“I’m guessing you’ve never seen the movie _Alien_ ,” Lance murmured numbly, letting go of the fabric to reach up and rub the back of his neck. “I think she’s got one of those things in her that hasn’t killed her yet. I mean, I think…I think they’re using some of the Alteans that were left behind here as incubators.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Some violence in this chapter. Nothing exceptionally explicit, but there are some fights and combatants do get killed.

Keith’s arm was definitely broken, so it was a good thing he was ambidextrous. He’d made the mistake of being distracted when the first creature in the water had gone after Lance, paying too much attention to the one that was attacking the guy he shared a single brain cell with and not enough to the animal sneaking up on him. When Keith wasn’t looking it had come up behind him and clamped its jaws down on his elbow, and boy, the results weren’t pretty.

Completely crushed joint, as far as James could tell. Between his own leg, Keith’s arm, Adam’s eyes—in addition to apparently having gone batshit insane while in captivity—and Lance’s scrambled brain, they were running out of new ways to injure themselves. It was a miracle they’d managed to get this far.

James had been able to get the animal off Keith’s elbow with his knife, but he’d only done enough damage to make it let go. It had come back at Keith again twice before it decided the bayard blade in his good hand made the potential meal not worth the trouble. At which point it had gone to join the other one in attacking Lance, who had effectively been culled away from the pack.

And Lance…James could only imagine that his newly discovered space elf genetics had also brought him the grace of whatever Altean gods wandered this planet, because he’d managed to get away and get out of the water in one piece. Which was amazing considering the way those things had been trying to rip his limbs out of their sockets.

James had pulled Keith to the center of the lake while Acxa had gone to help Lance. She’d only gone a few yards before he was up at the surface on his own though, and she’d had to come back to help James get Keith out of the water. Then she’d gone in ahead of them through the vent to try and get a Galra uniform so she could try to help Lance.

After all was said and done, she’d come back and they’d regrouped in an empty office. They’d found the room’s previous occupant had left some extra clothing behind in the closet, which Acxa had ripped up and used to tightly bind Keith’s elbow.

Another Galra guard had come in and interrupted them, probably on his way to take a nap in an empty office while on duty, which had supplied them with a second uniform. James would have preferred to just make their way through the building cracking open Galra skulls, but with Keith’s arm so damaged they had to do things the gentle way. That meant dressing him up in the second uniform and crossing their fingers that anyone they came across believed he was just another half-Galra officer under Acxa.

And it had worked pretty well thanks to the eye color and face stripes. The two of them had gone ahead to make sure the coast was clear, and James followed at a distance with his gun at the ready. They’d managed to make it up to the floor below the command center, which was where they’d split up. Too many higher level Galra knew the Paladins’ faces now after they’d gotten cozy with Lotor while he’d been Emperor, it was too much of a gamble that the base commander here might find him familiar.

So now James and Keith were ducked in a recess behind a large potted plant that would have been long dead by now if it hadn’t been fake. The sheer amount of dust on the large fern leaves was a testament to how little the Galra cared about the space they currently occupied. They had just gotten word from Lance that there were about forty Altean soldiers downstairs, which was an absolute miracle.

Not as much of a miracle as the fact that Lance had called in at all, though. That had finally saved James from having to listen to Keith repeatedly wonder out loud where he was and if he was all right.

“So how should we do this?” Keith asked Acxa once Lance got off the line. “Should we try to take the room once the power is out, or wait for some of the Alteans to make it up here from the basement?”

“We’ll give them a chance to get to the armory, then I’ll cause the outage,” Acxa murmured as she headed back to the other Galra. “There’s one in the upper basement, they’ll get to it fast. Once the power goes down, we have to take the command center. We’ll only have five doboshes before they’re able to call for help, we need to cut the head off the snake while they take out the body.”

“How many Galra are in there with you?” James asked.

There was a pause. He could hear voices over her comm and knew she was too close to others to speak. After a few moments she got away from whoever was speaking to her.

“Eight,” she said softly. “Two techs working the computers, barely battle trained. They’ll be easy. Four lower ranking soldiers, the base commander, and his second in command.”

“Oh, is that all?” James asked lightly, rubbing his temple. This had the potential to be a disaster if they didn’t time everything perfectly. “We can take out eight with one hand tied behind Kogane’s back.”

Keith punched him in the shoulder with his good hand.

“Ow, will you stop doing that?” James demanded. He flicked Keith’s injured elbow in retribution, earning a hiss of pain.

“Will you two knock it off? This is serious. The commander was trained by Sendak,” Acxa answered. “I’ll take care of him. You two need to take out those techs and then go for the rest of them.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll handle it,” Keith answered, giving James a glare. “We’re going to move to the stairwell, we’ll give it twenty seconds after the power goes down and then move in.”

Acxa gave a sound of affirmative, and James leaned out to take a look up and down the hallway. It was empty, they hadn’t seen anyone on this floor yet and he honestly didn’t expect to. The first floor was where those assigned to the building seemed to be milling around, and the top floor was where the leaders were. There was nothing of use in between.

Keith stepped out to lead the way, and even though James was technically in the process of becoming a higher rank, he let him.

Aside from Adam, nobody in this group of misfits really took much note of James. As Romelle had jokingly said at one point, because he wasn’t constantly loud and obnoxious they tended to forget he was even there half the time. And since he hadn’t actively fought with most of them for an extended period of time, very few of them really saw him as a soldier. Even Keith and Lance, who had been with him on the ground a few times six months ago, seemed to have forgotten what he was capable of.

He knew those two, at least, thought he had a thing for Acxa because he’d overheard them talking once or twice. Their juvenile little schoolyard theory told him they weren’t very observant.

If they were, they would have noticed that Acxa was no less squirrely now than she had been before. Once the truth had come out about the colony being where Altean children were kept, she had not become anymore forthcoming with information unless asked, or any more open. In fact, she behaved like a person who still had something to hide, and who still had something she wanted.

Lotor was only part of her game plan. There was something else she wanted here, something she hadn’t been able to just walk in alone and get because she would have been caught when the guards checked in with Honerva. Something she needed a gifted Altean for in Lotor’s absence, or she wouldn’t have risked her own skin to try and help Lance on the bridge.

James wasn’t always in Acxa’s company because he was smitten—though he did have to admit that she was hot—but because that was what he knew. From the moment he had become an active duty soldier after the invasion, he had spent his time following Curtis’ advice and falling into line most closely to those who were likely to do him harm.

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies and potential enemies closer. And until he knew exactly what Acxa was so desperate to find here, let everyone think he was a starry-eyed, infatuated idiot.

That was why he let Keith go first now. Not because he had faith in Keith’s ability to lead, but because Keith was big enough to make a very visible target. James wanted all the guns in the room aimed at somebody else, so he could get a few seconds to take stock of the situation and make sure Acxa wasn’t screwing them over.

They hit the stairwell and he swept it quickly with his gun before moving past Keith and bounding up the stairs to the top. He stopped there, resting his prosthetic foot on the top step and closing his eyes to “listen.”

His feelings toward the prosthetic weren’t what others might consider normal, he knew. In his younger days he would have been far more devastated over the loss of part of his limb, far more haunted by the fact that he had a piece of enemy technology plugged into his nerves and its software running up into his brain. But now, after everything he’d been through, just being able to say “I’m still alive” in the morning was a big enough win for him.

A lot of people he had grown up with, or who had taught him at the Garrison when he was a student, weren’t around to say that anymore. James had already come to terms with the fact that he could end up dead in the war, or paralyzed, or comatose in a hospital somewhere. He had already made peace with the fact that a lot of soldiers lost body parts, and that if his plane ever crashed he could suffer the same. So while he was in no way in love with the strange alien machinery attached to him, he regarded the whole incident with a level of detachment many people would find odd.

It had helped that on the first day in the commercial hub of the outpost, Adam had inspected it and talked it over with him. It was about an hour of the logical engineer making a brief appearance to poke around in the circuits and ensure there was nothing dangerous about it, and then a few hours of Adam being calm and serious enough to talk him through the fact that he’d lost a leg and had a fake one attached. It had been reassuring, to discuss it with another soldier who had lost his eyes and now saw through similar technology.

It didn’t escape James’ notice that he was already beginning to rely heavily on it as a sixth sense. He was almost constantly using it to check the vibrations around him, to gauge if anyone was nearby and who it might be. And the more he used it, the more intuitive and easy it became.

“The techs are to the right,” James said softly, eyes still closed as he motioned in the direction where typing was coming from. “The other soldiers are split up…two in the middle here and two over to the far right. They’re not armored, at least not heavily. Acxa is over to the left with two others, I’m guessing the commander and his second.”

He opened his eyes and backed down a few steps, letting Keith move ahead again since the guy was so dead set on being the first one into action.

“Stay back behind me,” Keith said quietly as he prepared to go in. “I’ll hit the techs, then start on the soldiers. You keep back by the door where it’s safe and cover Acxa and I while we clear the place.”

“Sure,” James answered, having no intention whatsoever of doing any of that.

They heard the hum of the air circulation system begin to whine down, and were briefly dropped into darkness as the lights in the stairwell went out. After about two heartbeats, dim red emergency lights came on instead.

“Here goes nothing,” Keith muttered.

He kicked open the door and threw himself into the room, which turned out to be just as terrible of an idea as James had thought it would be. Keith headed straight for the two techs, who were as thrown off by the sudden power outage as Acxa had predicted and were scurrying to get things back online, a path that took him right between the two groups of two soldiers and effectively put him right in the middle of the enemies in the room.

And if Keith hadn’t been injured, James knew he would have been able to pull off his stunt. But he was injured, which meant he was unable to use both his shield and his weapon at the same like he would have done under normal circumstances. And that made going right through the middle a bad idea.

James ignored Keith for a moment, taking only one step into the room and sweeping with his eyes to verify what he’d picked up through vibrations. Two techs across the room looking confused, four lightly armored soldiers already raising their guns at Keith, the base second-in-command on his way to the floor after a surprise uppercut from Acxa, and the base commander still processing what was going on.

James’ second step into the room propelled him forward into a roll, making him a smaller target and moving him quickly behind an empty computer console. He came up to his feet, reaching back to pull the knife out of his belt as he did so, and threw it across the room where the blade planted between one tech’s shoulder blades. The second went down with three fired shots, and then James dropped back behind the desk again.

“Come on, those were my targets!” He heard Keith yell.

“Sorry,” James yelled back, knowing he didn’t sound the least bit apologetic. “Watch your nine.”

He stayed in a crouch, hurrying along the row of unmanned consoles until he reached the end, peeking out to get a view of what was going on. Acxa had taken out the second-in-command as soon as he’d hit the ground, he could see that the guy was never getting up again. She was in a full-on fight with the base commander though, and might need help once she started to tire. Keith had been forced to back into a corner, since he didn’t have a shield to use to get close enough to use his blade. Two soldiers had him pinned down. The other two were…James wasn’t sure where the other two were.

Until he felt warm metal press against the back of his neck.

“Drop your weapon,” the voice behind him ordered. “Hands up, and get up slowly.”

“You’re fast,” James said as he dropped his gun and raised his hands, showing that they were empty. He carefully rose, keeping his hands up. “Quiet, too. I guess every now and then a few of you have to be decently trained.”

“You in the corner,” the second soldier barked in Keith’s direction as he came around to James’ other side, sandwiching him in between two guns. “Drop the sword and come out or your friend gets shot!”

“He doesn’t care if you shoot me,” James informed them.

“He’s right, I don’t care if you shoot him,” Keith seconded. There was a crash to the right as Acxa threw the Galra she was fighting with into a monitor, neither of them noticing what was going on in the rest of the room.

“You think this is some kind of joke?” A soldier asked Keith. The one to James’ right pressed the gun right up against the back of his shoulder. “Drop the sword and come out or he gets it.”

“He’s not coming out,” James repeated.

“Yeah, no, go ahead and kill him,” Keith agreed.

“See? He’s kind of a jerk.”

Acxa took a hit that sent her sliding past them on the floor. There was a horrible squeaking sound as she twisted around and stopped herself by digging her boots into the floor, then she was back on her feet an launching herself at the base commander again. They both crashed into another monitor yelling at each other in Galran.

“Can somebody _stop_ them?” One of the soldiers asked.

“The commander will handle her,” the soldier to James’ right barked. “Garek, get on the comm and call some backup in here.”

One of the Galra aiming his gun at Keith sidestepped over to the console. He leaned over and pushed one of the techs out of the way, shifting the body to fall on the floor. James’ eyes flicked over to Keith, who met his gaze. He had seen the knife sticking up out of the dead soldier’s shoulder too.

“The system is still rebooting,” Garek announced. “It’s going to be a few ticks.”

“Good, a few ticks is all we need,” James answered.

He stepped to his right, throwing his elbow up and back to catch the soldier there square in the face. As his arms came back forward he grabbed the gun the Galra was holding, wrenching it free from his hands in his surprise. Rather than fumble with it to try and fire he brought the whole thing around like a club, slamming the Galra to the left of him in the face. He brought the gun back around the other way and slammed the side of the first Galra’s head.

Now they were both off balance. James dropped the gun but kept going with his momentum, turning all the way around so he could reach up and hook the front of the second Galra’s neck. He jumped, effectively hanging from the soldier’s neck and letting his full weight pull him down backwards. As they went down he adjusted himself to land on one knee, slamming the soldier’s back across the other.

Keith rolled forward out of his hiding place, scooping the knife out of the tech’s body and throwing it. James heard the grunt behind him as the first soldier took the blade in the chest and slumped down. As the enemy Galra fell within reach James grabbed the knife from his body and slammed it into the gut of the second soldier.

He didn’t stop to consider the results, already up and moving again to kick all the guns out of reach of the dead and dying soldiers. Grabbing his own gun off the floor he fired off some shots at the back of the Galra coming up behind Keith, then spun around to aim at the base commander.

The commander saw James leveling his gun and suddenly dropped the blade he was fighting Acxa with. Instead he grabbed her arm, flipping her over and sending her flying into James. Her full weight hit his upper body, and they hit the floor and rolled. As they came to a stop he tried to scramble to his feet but Acxa was faster, literally picking him up and throwing him off of her.

This time he slammed into the legs of the last Galra soldier still standing, taking him down with him. Keith took advantage of the chaos to get in close with his bayard, slicing the Galra’s gun clear in half and then taking him down. James ducked down as Keith jumped over him to help Acxa, rolling over to sit up and taking aim at the commander again.

Between Keith and Acxa he couldn’t get a clear shot…until Acxa saw an opening and moved in with her blade. The Galra commander saw her coming and ducked to the side, grabbing her arm and maneuvering her into Keith. James raised his gun back up and fired twice.

One shot went wide, the other hit its mark. The commander stumbled backwards, then slumped down to the floor. The room went quiet, and James let himself fall backward on the floor. A moment later he heard the other two groaning as they realized all enemies were down and let themselves briefly relax.

“How do I explain to my dentist that I think your belt buckle chipped my tooth without telling another living soul about the complete mess that last five minutes was?” James asked the ceiling.

“If it makes you feel any better, I think your tooth chipped my belt buckle,” Acxa answered. He heard her shifting to get up and sat up himself, rubbing his back as he climbed to his feet.

James glanced over the console he was standing near, but he didn’t know what he was looking at. He was scheduled for training on the Atlas bridge in two weeks, for now the only computers he knew how to work were personal tablets and the control consoles of the MFE fighters. But it looked like the power had finished booting up.

“So now what?” He asked as Acxa and Keith came to join him, dropping down into the techs’ empty chairs.

“Now we take a look around,” Acxa answered.

She started up the security cameras and began shifting through them. The command center was plugged into every security camera in the colony, and images flickered by of mostly empty walkways and the occasional pair of Galra guards walking around outside.

As the view switched to inside, that changed. There wasn’t a single view that came up that didn’t have a visual of Altean guards cuffing or locking up Galra soldiers as the building was retaken.

“Hold on, go back!” Keith said suddenly.

Acxa flipped back to the last camera, and they just barely caught sight of somebody disappearing around a corner. James could tell it was Lance by the style of his armor greave, but they got a better view when she switched cameras to an oncoming visual. Lance was running along with the Altean woman he’d gone investigating with—Hira, James thought her name was—and carrying a little girl. He didn’t know what they were running from, but they were booking it.

Acxa followed them with the cameras as they darted into an elevator, but she couldn’t find the feed for inside the elevators themselves.

“Lance?” Keith activated his comm, getting up from his seat to slowly pace. “You guys okay down there?”

“Uuuuh,” Lance’s voice was breathless. “We have a little problem. Did you guys take the command center?”

“Yeah, we got it. As far as I can tell, they didn’t send out any distress signals.”

“And the rest of the building?”

“Looks like we got it,” Keith answered. James looked over at the screens the same time he did, at the view of some of the Altean guards starting to spill out of the building and take the bridge. “Hira’s people are starting to move out into the colony. Did you find anything?”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” James heard the sound of the elevator door opening, and Acxa filtered through cameras to get a view of him on the first floor. He let Hira lean against the wall to rest for a moment, laying the little girl down at her feet before starting to pace. “There’s about four druids that we could see…we have them in an infectious disease lockdown but that’s not going to do anything.”

“That lockdown evacuates all the air and makes it impossible to open the doors,” Acxa answered. She leaned over to hit some buttons on the monitor Keith had momentarily abandoned. “If you locked them in, they’re not going—”

She stopped as a view of the med bay came up. The doors were not only open, but one was barely hanging on by a thread and the other was lying on the floor. James did not like the look of that…he could tell from here those doors were several inches of solid metal.

On the other monitor, both Hira and Lance had turned toward the elevator. It was going back down to the basement, summoned down by whoever was down there, but when Acxa tried to tap into that camera again all she got was static.

“This isn’t good,” Keith frowned. “We’ve been up against those druids before. One or two I’d say we might be able to deal with, but not four. Not with just us, and those Altean soldiers aren’t armored well enough.”

“Go. _Go_ ,” Lance had picked the little girl up and put her into Hira’s arms. He turned to look up at them through the camera as she jogged off down the hallway. “Listen, Hira’s on her way up, she’s got something really important to show you guys. I’m going to try and do something with these druids.”

“What? No, get the hell out of there!” James surprised himself with how vehement he sounded. “You’re not made of fucking magic, McClain, no matter how lucky you’ve been these last few weeks! Get up here!”

“No, listen, they’re really pissed off at me,” Lance insisted, glancing over at the numbers above the elevator as it started to climb. “Hira will explain better, but I think I picked up something in the quintessence field that they really don’t like. Something that made them react to me, specifically. I think if I can keep them distracted they won’t bother anyone else, they barely even looked at her.”

“How do you think you’re going to keep four druids distracted?” Keith demanded. “Do you even remember what happened with Macidus?”

“Just trust me, okay?” Lance requested. “I got a heads up from Red that half of those Galra cruisers up in the atmosphere jumped somewhere else a little while ago, so I think those guards couldn’t get through to Honerva out on the bridge because she’s distracted. I’ll lead these guys away, you all get the others down here to take back this colony!”

He glanced back at the elevator again, then started backing away. The doors opened and Lance started running, and then the camera’s feed went to static. James stared at it for a moment, then looked at the others.

“Okay, so how do we save his dumb ass?” James asked. “Without getting murdered ourselves.”

There was a soft ding sound, and the light went on over the elevator that came up to this floor. All three of them jumped, James swiveling around to level his gun as the door opened. He lowered it again when he realized it was just Hira.

“What’s going on?” Acxa asked immediately, crossing the command center to take the little girl out of Hira’s arms. “What’s wrong with her? What happened down there?”

Hira looked shaken, which was upsetting because as far as James could tell Hira did not look like the kind of woman who was easily frightened.

“The druids,” Hira answered, leaning heavily against an unused console and wincing as she tried to stretch the leg she was limping on. “We thought they were our own people turned against us, but we were wrong. The truth is so much worse.”

* * * * * * * * * *

“Do you have to stare?” Kuro asked, pointedly keeping his eyes forward as the elevator doors closed and they started going down.

“Yes.” Takashi kept staring.

“You’re making it weird.”

“This was weird as soon as it started, I didn’t make it anything.”

“You’re acting like you’ve never seen a physical replica of yourself put together from multiple alien species’ DNA and let loose to wreak havoc on the universe,” Kuro returned.

“You are kind of the first.”

“I’m not the first, you’re _wearing_ one.”

Takashi did an excellent job of hiding the wince, but Kuro had seen that expression in the mirror before and he recognized it. Clearly, dying and being switched over to a body that looked like him but technically wasn’t his own was a sore spot. They both turned back to stare at the elevator door in silence.

Predictably, it didn’t last long.

“So,” Takashi broke the quiet before Kuro did, rocking back and forth on his heels and looking up at the indicator strip as it stated they had reached the MFE hangar. “Adam calls you Ryou.”

Kuro had known Adam would come up in conversation sooner than later once they were alone. He was the reason Takashi was out here in the first place after all, getting his dumb ass caught in traps and almost getting murdered by Honerva. What he hadn’t expected was for the conversation to immediately go this route.

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you,” Kuro advised.

“I’m not jealous.”

“Yes you are. We both know how first names are used in our culture.”

Takashi fell silent. Kuro let his eyes fall down from the numbers as they reached the Lion hangar, the reflections of two eerily identical men disappearing as the doors opened. He stepped out first and moved aside, glancing around to make sure there was nobody nearby before he spoke.

“Does it make you uncomfortable that I’ve been calling you Takashi?”

The question made Takashi pause. He hadn’t expected it, but Kuro had noticed the other man consistently looked thrown off every time Kuro had said his name. It was just a natural thing for Kuro to call him, having been created from the same brain. Takashi frowned a little, rubbing the back of his neck the same way Kuro often did when uncertain or embarrassed, thinking it through.

“No,” he said finally. “It doesn’t bother me, I’m just not used to it. Adam’s the only one who’s called me by it since kaasan died.”

Kuro hadn’t known Takashi’s mother had died, his memory didn’t extend that far. But he did remember her, very clearly, and those words hit him like a punch in the gut. It was silly, of course, to love a mother that wasn’t actually _his_ , but he did and it was painful news.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that,” Takashi backpedaled. Kuro assumed his expression had flickered before he’d managed to lock it down. “It’s like looking in a mirror, I forget you don’t remember everything.”

“It’s fine,” Kuro brushed it off lightly. It was very much not fine, not at all, but he knew he didn’t have any right to be affected by it. His past was fake, Ryou Kurogane had never been Noriko Shirogane’s son and she had never raised or loved him. That she had passed honestly wasn’t any of his business at all in the first place. “I can just all you Shiro, of you prefer.”

“No, it’s all right. Takashi is fine,” Takashi didn’t look at him when he said it, instead he looked across the hangar toward the Blue Lion. Still awkward, still embarrassed.

Kuro understood. Although they were now different people, before Kuro’s personality had diverged they had been exactly the same. Some of those traits still remained, and he could still remember those that didn’t. Takashi’s insecurity about forming relationships was one of those. He had lost his father early on and had been an only child, he _liked_ letting people in and he wanted to be open because it was better than being lonely. That much didn’t seem to have changed since he was a child, but he was awkward about it because most people weren’t like that, and they got weird when somebody was too friendly too soon.

That was something Kuro had long since stopped caring about. He’d once asked to see someone’s intimate tattoo after barely a hello and a handshake, he had no anxiety about laying claim to people. He’d found that if he was loud enough about it, they thought it was endearing instead of creepy.

“You can call me Ryou if you want, it doesn’t bother me either,” he answered. “But Adam calls me Kuro, just like everyone else. He was scared back there, his head was cloudy and I was the only one he could focus on. People try to connect for comfort when they’re scared, that’s all.”

“Are you sure about that?” Takashi asked, sighing heavily as they started toward the Blue Lion. “Let’s face it, you’re what I’d be if I hadn’t left for Kerberos, if I'd let him pay all that money to get me into those medical trials for my disease. You’re what he wanted me to be. Whole, healthy, happy. Surprisingly well-adjusted. You’ve got your hair color, all your limbs, you’re a doctor instead of a broken soldier who just can’t seem to exist without a war…maybe he’s more interested than you think.”

Kuro had known there would be some insecurity in Takashi’s personality, but what he’d been through seemed to have compounded it more than expected. That term, “broken soldier,” that was a red flag all by itself even ignoring the rest of it.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It wasn’t me he wove an insanely stupid plot to murder Honerva over, and it wasn’t me he went the extra mile to lock safely away while he was doing it,” Kuro answered. Now it was his turn to feel awkward and uncertain, as he tried to pick the right words to say what he wanted. “And even if it was, he’s a little too…flirty for me.”

“That’s just how he is,” Takashi answered, smiling slightly. “He’s very picky about who he let’s see the real him. It’s probably hard to believe, but Adam is very sweet and caring in private. He’s a lot less over the top, his advances are more...romantic.”

“Yeah, that’s still too…much. He’s just too much,” Kuro said lamely, not sure how to explain without sounding weird. Well, more weird than they already thought he was. “I’m not attracted to him, that’s probably a requirement in the kind of relationship he wants.”

“Ah, okay.” Takashi seemed to understand that. Unfortunately, instead of ending that conversation it just seemed to pique his interest in seeing how alike or different they really were. “Sorry, I just assumed you were…you know. You prefer women?”

“No,” Kuro answered uncomfortably. “I’m not physically attracted to people.”

“Oh.” Takashi stopped walking entirely. Kuro saw his eyes widen slightly, saw them slide briefly down to Hoshi, who had trotted over to them and was following alongside them, the back to him. “Uh…”

It took Kuro a moment to translate that gaze and noise. When he did, he was extremely offended.

“Oh, oh my God!” He exclaimed, giving Takashi a look of disgust. “No! Jesus Christ, no! What is _wrong_ with you? Hosh, he didn’t mean that!”

“Sorry!” Takashi said sheepishly, holding his hands up in surrender. “I didn’t mean to…God, sorry, I wasn’t trying to…”

“I meant I don’t feel sexual attraction at all, you half-used bucket of paint!” Kuro ground out. Admittedly, Unilu insults lost some of their bite when translated to English, but he’d make do. “So boinking your boyfriend is not on my to-do list!”

"Okay! Okay, sorry!" Takashi defended. "Your wording wasn't exactly clear. Besides, you've been living alone for like fifteen years! How would you even know you're not attracted to people?"

There was Kuro’s least favorite question, like not wanting to crawl into bed with anyone he found pleasing to look at was such a foreign concept that it couldn’t be real. It was the question this conversation always seemed to lead to, as if Kuro couldn’t possibly know himself well enough to make that claim. It was an annoying, prying question that always made him feel like he was defending his right to be a certain way.

The only reason he even answered was because he didn’t think Takashi actually cared what he did or didn’t do and with who. This conversation was still about Adam.

“I left the facility plenty of times to barter for supplies at nearby outposts,” Kuro answered as they came to a stop by the Blue Lion. “They have people there, you know, lots of them. I even dated a guy for a few months before he had to relocate, his name was Naeve. He was nice.”

“If you’re not attracted to people, why would you date one?”

“Physical and romantic attraction are two different things,” Kuro said flatly. “My emotions originate in my brain, not in my pants. Which is exactly where I’m going to kick you in a minute if you keep going.”

Takashi let out a deep breath through his nose and looked across the hangar, motioning for Bandor to come join them from where he was sitting over by the wall.

“Okay,” he said as he waited for the Altean to reach them. “But what if—”

“ _I’m not your competition_ ,” Kuro interrupted. Whether Adam chose to be romantically involved with Takashi once this was all over was a question only time could answer, but the last person Takashi needed to feel threatened by was Kuro. “Really. Truly. I have a type, he’s not it.”

“How do you have a type if you don’t…”

Takashi trailed off when Kuro pointed warningly at him. There was a time and place to explain how he handled romantic partners, and that was when he felt like it, which wasn’t now, and where he felt like it, which wasn’t here.

Kuro stepped away to grab the medic bag he had dropped in their hurry to get Adam to the med bay. He knelt down to assess what he had, knowing that once the fighting started in earnest he might end up being the first responder. He had bandages, pain killers, antiseptics, and a variety of small emergency equipment. And, at the bottom, a small box.

It was pretty far down, as if it had been secretly tucked under the neatly packed supplies but had become dislodged in all the recent action. Attached to it was an envelope with his name, written in handwriting he recognized as his own.

But he didn’t remember ever leaving this box.

Curiously, he opened the box and lifted out the metal circlet, holding it up for inspection. His stomach dropped when he identified it, and he knew that under the circumstances it couldn’t possibly mean anything good.

“Oh, we’ve used those,” Takashi said, noticing the circlet and taking it out of Kuro’s hand to look at it. “We had a mission once where Pidge needed to wipe her memory so enemy soldiers couldn’t read her reactions to know she was an undercover Paladin.”

“Yes, the facility used them on trauma patients,” Bandor answered, taking it from Takashi to look at it himself. “If there was an accident or something that they just couldn’t work through, they’d erase it until the person got well enough to deal with it.”

“It’s a pretty standard piece of medical equipment at the facility,” Kuro lied, reaching up to take the circlet back. He put it back into the box, careful to keep the envelope with his name on it hidden on the underside. “Not really useful for battlefield medicine though, I probably grabbed it by accident thinking it was something else.”

He tucked the box back down under some bandages and shouldered the bag, suddenly very aware of his situation. He had promised Lotor he wouldn’t set foot on a human ship, yet here he stood on Earth’s main warship right next to its Captain. If there was something he knew, or something he had done, that was bad enough he had felt the need to erase it then this might be the worst place he could possibly be right now.

Kuro was beginning to feel a very strong need to get off of the Atlas.

“I need to hail Lotor,” he told Takashi. “I need to let him know I’m here.”

Takashi paused, considering that. He looked from Kuro to Bandor and back as if he were only just now stopping to actually take stock of them, only just now remembering that they weren't part of his little Paladin play group.

“Actually…maybe you shouldn’t do that yet,” Takashi disagreed after a moment. “I told him back on that rock planet that I was going to send you and Bandor back to the facility and come back alone, he didn’t want you out here in the fighting. Now’s probably not the best time to tell him I basically waved you two under Honerva’s nose.”

“We’re adults,” Bandor answered. “Sort of. Allegedly. He can’t get angry because we happened to get kidnapped by a sentient space ship.”

“Even so, there’s a reason he didn’t want you here,” Takashi frowned. “He knows the lay of the land in this fight better than I do. I've been dragging you two along so far, but I think maybe now it’s better to defer to him on this. And Bandor, your sister would murder me if anything happened to you. You two should probably stay here on the Atlas.”

“You can’t just decide to leave us here,” Kuro objected. “We’re not your crew.”

“No, you’re not anyone’s crew,” Takashi agreed. “You’re technically civilians, and I can’t in good conscious take you out into this fight. Lieutenant Connor?”

He activated his comm, speaking to another soldier on the ship. Kuro didn’t know where, and the conversation was filtered through Takashi’s helmet so he couldn’t hear the other half.

“Please send two airmen down to the Lion hangar. I have two people I need escorted to one of the empty guest quarters.” Takashi paused, glancing over at Kuro. “Actually, send six.”

“Honestly, I don’t know how to feel,” Kuro said to Bandor. “Offended that he’s not even being subtle about implying I can’t be trusted, or flattered he thinks I need five babysitters to keep me out of trouble.”

“Do you need five?” Bandor asked, looking mildly worried about what that might mean he was about to get pulled into.

“Oh, definitely. And I guess it is kind of nice to have my potential recognized.”

“It’s a big ship and the people here are on high alert,” Takashi said, resting a hand on each of their shoulders and steering them back toward the hangar entrance. “We had an incident recently with one of the Paladins and we’re not exactly friendly with Alteans right now. Some of the guards here might shoot first and ask questions later, this is just to keep you both safe.”

“We’re getting locked in somewhere, aren’t we?” Kuro asked. As if to answer his question, Takashi opened the door and herded them out, and a moment later the elevator opened to reveal six uniformed and armed soldiers.

“We’re getting locked in somewhere,” Bandor affirmed.

“And the wolf is coming with me,” Takashi added.

“Wait, what? You can’t just take my wolf,” Kuro protested, whirling back around to face him. “Hoshi, over here!”

Hoshi cocked her head to the side, her tail flicking slightly, but she didn’t move from where she was standing over by Takashi. Kuro knew the wolf was going to do whatever she wanted, she always had, but he still felt a surge of annoyance.

“I’m not “taking her,” I’m bringing her along,” Takashi corrected. “I’ve seen one of these in action before, I know they’re smart enough to understand a lot more than we give them credit for. You’re just going to use her to try and sneak around the ship, I need her to potentially save lives.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kuro waved him off, shoving past the stunned looking soldiers to step into the elevator with Bandor in tow. “What are you all staring at?”

They all looked between him and Takashi, trying to process what they were seeing.

“Er, older brother,” Takashi lied. “Family drama, long story. Take them up to the private guest quarters and keep them confined for the moment. Get them some lunch and make sure they’re comfortable. Nobody gets access to them except me.”

“Yes, sir.” One of the soldiers waved the others back into the elevator. Kuro leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed.

“Oh,” Takashi called as the doors started to close. “And watch out for the taller one. He can probably wipe the floor with half of you.”

They all immediately looked at Kuro, the two that were closest edging back a little. It was almost comical, one man taking up half the elevator and six soldiers watching him warily from the other half. Bandor was completely oblivious to there being any issue.

They went up several floors, and when the elevator doors opened it was into a quiet, carpeted hallway that was devoid of life or noise. The soldiers piled out and motioned for them to do the same, and Kuro sulkily complied. He followed the soldiers passed two meeting rooms with large, windowed walls and then down another hallway lined with office doors. They were in the officer quarter, Kuro assumed, the part of the ship where visiting diplomats would be housed during parlay and where meetings between important people could be held.

Around another corner, and they stopped about halfway down the hall at one door. A soldier motioned toward them.

"Hands on the wall, legs apart."

"I'm sorry, what?" Kuro asked, not sure he'd heard correctly.

"Hands on the wall," the soldier repeated. "Legs apart. And give me the gun."

Kuro looked at the group of soldiers and sighed, pulling off the gun he still had over his shoulder. He let one of them take it and moved to stand next to Bandor, hands against the wall as ordered.

"Just be careful, will you? I don't really like when people get too touchy feel- Oh, quiznak, not cool!" Kuro cut off and tensed as hands ran up his inner thighs to check for weapons, his voice coming out slightly higher in pitch than he meant for it to. " _Not cool!_ "

"He's clear," the soldier patting him down moved away, leaving him feeling a little bit violated. 

"Bag's clear," another soldier declared, handing him back his medic bag as they finished searching it. A third soldier opened the door to the room and motioned for them to go inside, and Kuro did so in as exasperated a manner as he could muster.

“We’ll get you a list of what’s available from the cafeteria,” one woman promised. “The choices will be a bit limited, when we’re battle ready only the prepackaged stuff is available.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kuro muttered, stepping further into the room and looking around. The door closed behind them.

It was a nice room. Not very big, but it wouldn’t be since it was on a military ship. It had a bed built into one wall, drawers built into the other, and a desk built into the far side. There was a door next to the desk that led to a tiny private bathroom, the one true luxury on a warship, and a panel above the drawers slid aside to reveal an entertainment monitor.

Kuro flopped irritably on one end of the bed, leaning back against the wall while Bandor began playing with the screen. He started flipping through channels, marveling at the different programs, a far cry from the complete lack of such entertainment that likely plagued Colony Two. There were no windows in this small room, that would be a very dangerous decoration in a ship designed to be shot at, and it made everything feel so claustrophobic.

Kuro pulled his knees up and dug in his medic bag, pulling out the circlet box and the envelope with his name. He made sure Bandor was completely lost in some odd bii boh sitcom and quietly opened the envelope, making sure the paper inside was hidden from view as he unfolded it.

The handwriting was his, but Kuro had no memory of ever writing it. The lines were even and it was neat, so it hadn’t been written in a panic or under duress. It was clear and legible and written with an even pressure, pen put to paper in a moment of calm and rationality:

_Lotor’s been gone for eight months (two months in real time). The empire is fracturing, open space is getting dangerous. I don’t think he’s coming back, I think it’s time for me to move forward on my own. I’m putting this in the medic bag I’m most likely to take with me if I ever leave the Abyss for any real length of time. If you choose to leave here permanently, you’ll need this._

_Be prepared before you use it. Using it means taking back Takashi Shirogane’s memories, all of them. I’m going to wipe most of them out, leave just enough to give me some sense of being human, and hopefully I’ve given you a chance to stop being “Shiro” and to become a whole person of your own._

_There’s a lot of baggage, guilt, and trauma here. People he left behind who I miss, badly. Places I’m homesick for. This place is empty, it’s just endless hours to sit in silence and think about Earth. About Adam, and Keith, and Dani and Val. About the Garrison. To wonder if Sam and Matt are alive._

_What happened after Kerberos is the worst part, but it’s the part you really need to know. You need to know what you are, and you need to know that people can and will die because of you. If you can’t handle the reality of that, and you can’t handle remembering all of those things, go back to the Abyss and stay there_.

That was it. Brief and to the point, and Kuro hadn’t really expected anything else. He picked up the circlet and flipped it over in his hands, inspecting it even though he had seen them before and knew there was nothing new about it.

Kuro wondered what kinds of terrible secrets were locked in this thin metal loop. _People can and will die because of you_ , that was a very dark and morbid warning, that was for sure. He wondered if it was a warning that Honerva would never stop trying to track him down, or of something much worse.

The other concerns weren’t quite as concerning now as they must have been back then. Adam was alive and in a healing pod, and Kuro intended to personally make sure he got through all of this. He hadn’t actually come face to face with Keith, but he recognized the name as one of the Paladins who was down on the surface of the planet, so for the time being he was alive and well. Matt was up on the bridge, perfectly fine, and he had mentioned that Sam was an engineer here on the Atlas. The other two names, Dani and Val, he didn’t recognize those, but if they were soldiers it was a 50/50 chance that they weren’t still alive after the invasion of Earth.

The big question was, now that Kuro had spent fifteen years diverging from what he had originally been programmed to be, would that be enough to counter whatever was in the memory transfer? Would it be like those memories of childhood he still had, just little facts and references that were divorced from who he was, or would it make him feel like he was Takashi Shirogane?

_You need to know what you are._ That was another line that stood out. Kuro thought back to the lab, to the hours he’d spent poring over images and readouts of his own DNA, picking apart his genome to separate out all the different pieces that had been spliced together into the chimera that had become him. Hadn’t he already figured out what he was, for the most part? Or did that mean something else as well?

He was tempted to use the circlet right now out of sheer curiosity, but he made himself fold up the letter and put it back in its envelope, making it disappear into the bag. He had a very different, much more immediate problem right now, and that was being locked up on a human ship. 

Kuro slid off the bed, careful not to kick Bandor, who was now sitting at the other end watching the viewscreen. He made his way over to the door, to the communications unit on the wall there. It was probably very intuitive for somebody who had lived their whole life with Earth technology, but since Kuro had always worked with either Altean or Galran he had a little bit of trouble. It took him a few minutes to figure out how to contact other parts of the ship.

“Bridge,” a familiar voice finally came over the line, but only after he’d been waiting almost another full minute for it to connect.

Kuro got the feeling he had been intentionally left waiting for an answer. It was another second or two before the screen flickered on to show the speaker himself, leaning over the communications console to answer around a young woman who was currently sitting in the chair.

“Hey, Tall-And-Nervous,” he greeted Curtis cheerfully, doing his best to look as innocent as possible. “Just, you know, checking in. Seeing what’s up, what everyone else is doing.”

“Oh my God,” the young woman leaned in to look closer at her monitor, staring at him in surprise. “You weren’t joking!”

“Yeah, I’m never going to get tired of that reaction,” Kuro answered through a forced smile. He wondered how often he was going to suffer through the shocked stares.

Curtis put a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her back, nudging her out of the chair completely so he could take over.

“Nothing much going on, just a fight with half a Galra armada about to start,” he answered. “Something I can help you with?”

“Maybe,” Kuro supposed. “I’m locked in a room on your ship at the moment.”

“I know. The Captain let me know you’re going to be the guest of honor for a little bit,” Curtis answered. Kuro narrowed his eyes.

“Why are you smiling?”

“I’m not smiling.”

“You are. You’re _smirking_.”

“I’m not smirking.”

“I’m not blind, I can see it. It’s a very punchable expression.”

“You are smirking a little bit,” Bandor called from across the room.

“I’m not smirking,” Curtis repeated. He sat back in the chair, looking way too comfortable. “I’m just very relieved that you’re settled in there, completely for your own safety. Which is of course what we’re worried about, and not at all that you might jump out an airlock or something to go poke at whatever random monsters the Galra can muster up.”

“Jeez, are you still hung up on that?” Kuro asked. “You have to learn to let go of the past, you know? That was at least an hour ago, and you only got a handful of scratches.”

“Enjoy your stay,” Curtis answered, reaching to hang up the line.

“No no no!” Kuro whined, waving frantically. “Come on, you can’t leave me stuck in here. I did nothing to deserve this.”

Curtis gave a fake cough that sounded suspiciously like “bullshit.”

“Okay, I only did a little to deserve this,” Kuro corrected himself. “Can’t I come up there where I can at least see what’s going on? I promise I won’t even comment on that huge stick that’s apparently rammed up your a—”

“Watch it.”

“You have me locked in a closet with six guards outside, I’m a little bit testy.”

“I hate to break it to you, but nothing about you is in the closet,” Curtis quipped.

“I was frisked,” Kuro bristled. “I had strangers’ hands in places I’m embarrassed to say I even own.”

“We call that a good night out in my circles.”

“They took my gun. What if I need it?”

“This is a war zone and you’re a non-combatant,” Curtis said. “Those soldiers are there for your safety, to make sure you stay that way.”

“Okay, well what if they weren’t there anymore and I wasn’t safe here? Then could I come up there?” Kuro pressed.

“They’re not going anywhere. And please don’t do anything stupid to try and change that, it’s not safe for you up here.”

“You don’t think I could take them.”

“Kuro, the Atlas has the best trained fighters on Earth. In the Coalition, even,” Curtis answered. “If you could take six of them, I would be very impressed.”

“But would I be allowed to come up to the bridge if I did?” Kuro repeated.

“Yeah, sure,” Curtis finally gave in. “But you’re going to end up in the infirmary if you try, so please just relax and sit tight until this is over. Good bye.”

He cut off the connection, leaving Kuro looking at a blank screen.

“He hung up on me,” he said in disbelief, turning to Bandor and gesturing to the screen.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would,” Bandor patronized without looking away from the entertainment screen.

“It’s like Earth is just one big barn all humans were raised in.”

“You’re an absolute angel, and yet they’ve all been so rude,” Bandor agreed.

There was a knock at the door and a second later it opened. The soldier who’d spoken to them before wordlessly offered Kuro a listing of what was currently available from the canteen, and started to leave them alone to decide. As the door started to slide closed Kuro reached out and grabbed it, forcing it to a grinding halt that made the soldier step back in surprise.

“Oh good, here we go,” Kuro heard Bandor murmur. He ignored him, forcing the door back open with a screech of machinery that was straining against the unexpected force.

“Hey, quick question,” Kuro stepped into the doorway, planting his feet at the base so he didn’t have to hold the door with his hands. “What exactly do you do to “guests of honor” if they don’t stay in their rooms?”

“Sir, you really should go back inside,” another soldier warned, all of them warily stepping back to put distance between him and themselves. He couldn’t say they were stupid, at least. “Nobody wants to do anything, but we are authorized to use force to keep you where you need to be.”

“Yeah, force, I figured that much,” Kuro swept his gaze over them, taking stock of the guns strapped to their bodies. His own gun was nowhere to be seen, it had likely been checked in somewhere by whoever had gone to get the menu. “But how much force? Are we talking a trip to the morgue or just like, a shot to the leg?”

“Kuro,” Bandor said warningly from behind him.

“I’m just asking,” Kuro defended. “Obviously I’m not interested in their morgue but I have two legs, I could probably work with just one.”

There was a whining sound as one of the soldiers turned on the taser she was carrying, then a second and third as two others followed suit. The other three didn’t seem to have those, they’d probably just try to shoot him.

“Sir, please go back into the room,” one requested politely.

“Oh, you have stun guns. Bandor, they have stun guns.”

“Okay, wonderful,” Bandor said nervously. “What are you telling me for? I don’t plan on bothering them.”

“Last request,” the soldier warned. “Back inside, please.”

“Okay, okay,” Kuro sighed, raising his hands in surrender. “Fine. But the door’s going to slam on me if I move, somebody set it to open so I can leave the doorway.”

The nearest armed soldier acquiesced, leaning forward to press some buttons on the door panel.

“Sorry in advance,” Kuro apologized.

He reached out and grabbed the man’s wrist, jerking him forward to use as a shield as two stun guns went off. Kuro pulled the soldier’s own taser out of his hands as he dropped the twitching man to the floor, rolling forward over his body and letting the door slam closed behind him to keep Bandor safe from any friendly fire if things went further south.

He rolled up to his feet with only about a foot between him and the three other soldiers who hadn’t drawn weapons, slamming the stun gun into one’s side and then dropping it along with the unconscious victim.

The two still-conscious soldiers who had initially fired were standing back as their tasers recharged. The other two started to draw their guns.

Kuro spun and did a jumping kick, catching the nearest man in the face with both feet, one after the other. He landed in a crouch on his toes and did another spin to sweep his opponent's legs out from under him, then rolled over him as he fell to get back on his feet again.

He was faster than they were, partly because he wasn’t weighed down by weaponry and partly because they didn’t know how to react to him, but it was still now three against one and the two tasers were recharged. They moved in closer to fire and Kuro lashed out at the nearest one with a foot, kicking the stun gun up into the air. He grabbed the woman by the wrist, pushing her arm up and ducking under it to twist it around behind her back, holding it there with one hand and catching the stun gun with the other.

He felt her twitch as the last taser went off, hitting her instead of him as he pulled her around to shield himself. He fired the taser he had back, taking down the last of the immediate threats and leaving just one soldier standing.

That last soldier was unshouldering his gun, and likely about to do Kuro the favor of making one of his legs useless. Kuro didn’t give him a chance, throwing the taser at him and making him duck. While the soldier’s eyes were on the makeshift projectile, Kuro ran forward and slid into his legs feet first, bringing him down to the floor and within reach of the first taser Kuro had initially dropped. He grabbed it, now charged, and slammed it into his current opponent’s side.

The hallway fell quiet, except for the groans of the soldier he had brought down with the kicks. Kuro winced as he got up, rubbing his hip where it had slammed into the floor with his slide. When the stun gun in his hand finished charging, he used it on the man starting to get up and dropped him unconscious to the floor with the others.

“Sorry!” He muttered, picking his way back to the door of the guest room. “Sorry, sorry! I really didn’t want it to go that way.”

He opened the door to find Bandor standing in the middle of the room looking worried. Kuro darted past him and grabbed his medical bag, pulling a bottle of painkillers out of it.

The shocks were non-lethal and weren’t meant to keep people down long. He could already hearing the first soldiers to fall beginning to stir, and he grabbed Bandor and dragged him out of the room.

“Take two of these, you’ll be fine,” he called, dropping the bottle of painkillers by the soldiers as they ran past. “Make sure you see your doctor if you experience any side effects like tingling limbs or hearing loss! Have a good day!”

Kuro had no idea where he was going, but generally the bridge of a ship tended to be up and forward. He dragged Bandor into the first elevator they came across and hit the button for the highest floor, breathing a sigh of relief.

“Okay, I was wrong earlier,” he said as the elevator door closed. “It apparently takes at _least_ seven to keep me out of trouble.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Tiny beads of translucent glass in rainbow shades of blue and green stretched as far as the eye could see. Sand made of crystal, dotted with outcroppings of glimmering quartz, glittering in the light of a sky that glowed with the shine of eternal spring.

A breeze shifted his hair, racing across the shimmering expanse of sapphire sea to further stir the surface of the water that lapped gently against his body. He stood knee-deep, feeling the ebb and flow of the current, eyes closed against the spray that danced on the air around his face.

There was no sound here but the gentle breaking of waves. No danger here, where the lapis tides kissed the edges of consciousness without fully crossing into reality. There was nothing but him and the water, the breeze and the semi-precious sand.

He opened his eyes and walked further out into the water, stopping when it was up to his waist and his fingers could dip below the surface. He knew the sea here didn’t go on forever, the horizon was much closer than it looked and just beyond it was the point of no return. The point of dark and silence, peace and rest.

There was nothing stopping him from going that far. He didn’t have to stay here if he didn’t want to, nothing could really keep him. Every step took him farther from the physical world, his grip on life was tenuous at best. It was a temptation like a siren’s song, the promise of letting go and no longer having to fight.

But he stayed where he was, feeling the water swirl around his hips and slip through his fingers. He didn’t really remember what he might leave behind if he continued on but he knew it was important. He knew the pull to stay was stronger than the one to leave, even if he didn’t really know how to find his way back.

He didn’t know how long he stood there. Maybe it was an hour, maybe it was a year, maybe it was only a few minutes. He was detached from everything, his mind blissfully empty of anything except the pleasantness of his surroundings.

The water moved slowly when it receded, pulling back away from him to leave him standing on a damp stretch of glassy beach, and he knew he wasn’t alone before he saw her. He heard the sands shifting under her hulking size, heard the protective metallic scales of her underbelly scrape along the broken pieces of quartz as she stretched out behind him. A great paw hooked him, pulling him back away from the tempting call of the horizon, and he slowly backed up at its urging.

He let himself sink back against one soft foreleg, resting his cheek against the great head made of solid blue starlight that leaned down to nuzzle him with gentle affection.

She was irked. Not at him, but he could tell. Her tail flicked behind her in quiet annoyance, proof that while her well of patience ran deeper than most it wasn’t bottomless. He got the impression she was worried, that she wanted to stay here with him but that outside matters were growing steadily more pressing and _someone_ was bothering her about it.

They were too different to communicate in words, but bound closely enough for her to convey her thoughts. She was disinterested in anything going on in the outside world at the moment, her concern was him and that he not wander toward the edge of her little pocket of space.

“Who’s pulling your chain, gorgeous?” He asked, running his fingers through the silky fur under her chin, his whole being vibrating with the soft purr that ran through her and momentarily stilled her agitated tail.

A rivulet of water parted from the rest, running forward to form a puddle that trickled upwards into an image. The form of a man in armor was familiar but he couldn’t completely place the face, and that bothered him. Something in the back of his mind told him this man was important to him, but he was so tired and he just couldn’t muster the energy to think. He didn’t _want_ to. He was exhausted, he deserved a chance to rest.

The man needed her, that was what was annoying her. She was split between staying here to watch out for him and something important that was going on out there, and she couldn’t choose.

“Go,” he urged, petting the fur along her jaw one last time before letting his hands fall away. He couldn’t remember his life outside of this place, but he knew he had some tie to this soldier. “I’ll be fine. Help him.”

She gave another low purr, nuzzling him once more before she pulled away and rose back to her full, grand height. One moment she was there beside him and the next she was gone, dissipating in a cloud of twinkling starlight to tend to matters of a world on the other side of consciousness.

He stepped forward to the sculpture of solid water still standing before him, reaching up to run his fingers along one cheek and jaw. He wanted to try and remember how he knew this face but cohesive thought was elusive; even as the shape in front of him began to melt away his eyes turned their unfocused gaze back out to the sea, immediately forgetting.

The tide flowed back in around him again, slowly rising back up until it reached his hips. Nothing, once again, but the sound of waves breaking and his own fractured thoughts.

Adam let himself sink down in the water, leaning back to look up at the sky. Azure blue with light dancing off clouds of diamond fractals, peaceful and serene.

* * * * * * * * * *

“Come on, Blue,” Shiro groaned, standing at the base of the sitting Lion that refused to so much as acknowledge his presence. “I need to get down there. They need you for this fight.”

Even after his time in the Black Lion, it still sometimes felt silly to talk to a ship and expect a response. Shiro wasn’t sure if that was because he’d never really belonged in Black and had never really communicated with him the way the Paladins seemed to, or if he was just too set in his ways to believe that machines were anything other than machines even if they seemed to react.

It was probably more the former. Even he had to admit that each Lion seemed to have a different personality, seemed to respond to different things in different ways. He could not ignore the fact that they repaired themselves and updated themselves, that they seemed to genuinely understand what was needed and when.

The real problem here, though, was that he didn’t understand Blue. Black was dignified and regal, Green was inquisitive, Yellow was solid and dependable, Red was unpredictable and kind of petty. Blue, though…she’d had all different pilots that he knew of, but he had no idea what the common thread between them was.

“Allura,” he finally opened his comm line, hating that he might have to admit to them that the Blue Lion was no longer responding.

“Here.”

“Back when we first arrived at the Castle, you were telling us the traits of the Lions. How did you know what they were?”

“You’re having trouble with the Blue Lion,” Allura immediately deduced. Unsurprising, she was smarter than he was.

“Yes,” Shiro admitted dully.

“We learned about them from the original Paladins,” Allura answered. “They piloted the Lions for many years before the war started, there were certain personality traits they each seemed to respond to more than others. Moods they reacted more actively to. Black is the leader, Red is the protector, Green is the strategist, Yellow is the diplomat.”

“And Blue?”

“Blue is the lover,” Allura replied. “In all its forms. Romance, compassion, familial affection. Lance was a flirt outwardly, but he was also training to be a fighter pilot and I imagine he saw protecting Hunk and Pidge as his duty toward his crew. Mother fought for Father and I, and I fight out of loyalty to my people and to all of you. The Blue Lion’s quintessence is reflected in a pilot who cares deeply and unconditionally about others.”

Shiro wondered if that was why Blue had responded to him earlier once she had sensed Adam nearby, if she knew that her pilot was why Shiro was out here in the first place. Lance and James too, of course, but one of his underlying drives had been the realization that Adam was alive.

Maybe now that he was here and safe, she had no interest in the rest of them anymore.

“All right, thanks,” he sighed, turning off his comm.

Shiro took off his helmet and sighed again, looking up at the silent Lion. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, glancing around nervously even though there was no way for anyone but him to be in this hangar. He started to pace slowly, back and forth, pausing when he felt like he was positioned in a spot out of view of the security cameras.

He could feel the heat on his neck, creeping up into his face even though he knew there were no witnesses. He cleared his throat and relaxed his stiff stance, crossing his arms and leaning in slightly.

“Hey, pretty lady,” he said haltingly, bringing up one hand to awkwardly copy Lance’s trademark finger guns. “If you were a phaser, you’d be set to _stun_.”

Nothing. Beside him, Hoshi whimpered as if she'd found the display physically painful.

“Yeah, don’t worry, I’m just going to go throw myself out of the airlock for that,” Shiro groaned.

The creak of moving metal rang out startlingly in the silence of the hangar as Blue started to move, her head dipping down and her boarding ramp lowering as her systems started to power up. Shiro looked at her in disbelief, then at the hand he had just done the stupid finger guns gesture with.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” he muttered.

“Shiro?” Hunk’s voice came over the comm and Shiro shook off his embarrassment, pulling his helmet back on as he darted to the Blue Lion’s cockpit with Hoshi at his heels. “I think we need to go.”

“Talk to me,” Shiro answered, dropping down into her pilot seat and pulling up the comm visuals as he started checking her readings of the area. “What’s going on?”

“The good news is that we just got word from Keith, they busted into the colony from the ground and took control of the central command station. They also found the colony guard force and let them loose, so if we can get Lotor down there he can activate this place’s defenses.”

“Okay,” Shiro said carefully, punching in the remote commands to open the airlock so he could join the others. “What’s the bad news?”

“Uh…Lotor’s cruiser just wormholed in,” Hunk answered, sending his own visuals over to Shiro. “And Honerva isn’t alone.”

An image of the cruiser flashed onto Shiro’s screen as he left the Atlas, speeding toward where the others were orbiting the colony planet just out of Galra sensors. It was definitely Honerva’s current ship, and Hunk was right, she wasn’t alone.

Flanking it were _two_ new versions of the mech that had nearly destroyed Earth.

“I’m just gonna go ahead and say it so you don’t have to,” Hunk gulped as Shiro finally reached them. “ _Oh no_.”


	23. Chapter 23

_**Five years ago, Abyss time**_ :

Kuro checked the readouts from the gravity scan for a third time just to be perfectly safe, then grabbed his supply bag and closed up the screen on his armor’s helmet. As he stepped out of the striker he pushed himself downward from the airlock door, grabbing a small protrusion of rock before he could be bounced off and out into the open Abyss.

He made quick work of his preparations, hammering in a spike and attaching his tether, and once he was secured he ran yet another scan.

The laws of physics were wonky here, if they worked at all, and sometimes the striker’s instruments were so sensitive they couldn’t filter out all the background noise when scanning objects as small as this asteroid. When he was satisfied, he opened his screen back up and collapsed his helmet, carefully taking and holding a breath.

It seemed fine. The air was very thin but it was breathable, even though it technically shouldn’t exist here. This asteroid, with no real atmosphere and barely any gravity, was just another oddity in this whole insane place.

He pushed back toward the striker, opening the door again only to almost immediately lose the fat little ball of fluff that attempted to scamper out. He grabbed the little gray and red wolf cub and hauled her back, sighing as he pulled the makeshift harness out of his pack and tried to put it on her.

“You need to stop doing that, you’re going to give daddy a heart attack,” he chastised, letting her float up above the asteroid surface as he reeled himself back to attach her harness to the anchor spike.

Hoshi slowly drifted upside down, her little feet going as if she might be able to run herself back upright, tongue hanging out of her mouth happily. He made sure she was safe from drifting off and moved to the edge of the asteroid, pulling out his tablet and a handful of probes.

The little cylinders turned on with the press of a button and he cast them out in several directions, gently pulling them to a stop before clipping the end of their strings to his belt. In the distance the three main stars of the Abyss lit the eerie dreamscape in a myriad of colors, bright enough to make him squint slightly as he ran his scanning programs.

Kuro had been researching the Abyss from the time he had arrived, since it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. It was fortunate that the place and its inhabitants were so fascinating, because he knew he was probably going to live out the entirety of his life and eventually die here, the only place that was really safe as the universe began slowly falling apart outside of its boundaries.

“Currents are weird here,” he said out loud to Hoshi, who obviously said nothing in return. “It’s like a shelf. Just a little bit further and the gravity increases astronomically, you’re probably dead long before you get pulled into the star. Well, you or I would be. Those celestial whale things seem to be able to get closer to the abyssal center.”

He was building a model of the gravitational currents in question when he noticed everything starting to get brighter and checked his watch. Third varga post mid-quintant, his predictive algorithm was off by about two vargas. Kuro tapped a reminder into his notes program to tweak the math and gave himself a push to float slowly backwards, hooking his foot in the loop of the anchor spike.

The star’s flares didn’t really affect the gravity as far as Kuro had seen, but it never hurt to be safe. He continued running his model, used to the waves of memory by now. They seemed to mostly follow events that caused stress and were always in the back of a person’s mind, but he had very little that bothered him enough for the flares to be an issue. He usually just got flashbacks of mundane things, like the time he’d caught his own dumb ass in his miskevit trap.

The light grew quickly and he had to close his eyes against the glare, feeling the pulse wash over him in its less than pleasant way. Kuro waited for the inevitable vision of the facility’s labs, bracing himself for whatever embarrassing thing he’d done that this wave was going to make him relive.

Still, he wasn’t ready for the sudden clash of light and sound. The asteroid and the quiet of space crumbled around him, leaving him standing in what was clearly an emergency area in a medical bay. From the way most things were fastened in place on the wall in case of shifting it was likely on a ship.

He had only an instant to deduce this before the double doors flew open and two gurneys were rushed in, the one stopping nearest to him holding the limp body of a tall, dark-skinned man in some kind of armor. He was attended by a handful of medical personnel, who were cutting and ripping open the armor he wore to get at his chest and begin compressions.

There was no blood, so Kuro couldn’t guess what might have caused the man’s condition. He did know the guy was a dead man though, just from the way his sightless eyes stared upward. But Kuro was less interested in the medical question and more interested in the people in the room.

They were human.

“Curtis! Ryou!”

Kuro whirled around, startled by the sound of his own voice calling his name. The door opened again to admit three people wearing weird, colored armor, but the main one that caught his attention was the oldest man. Even if Kuro hadn’t seen that same face in the mirror every day of his life he would have recognized the nose scar, now framed by white hair. Kuro knew Takashi Shirogane when he saw him, even with the hair change and the strange black armor.

He turned back to the man on the table as one of the techs pressed defibrillator paddles to his chest, delivering the first of what would probably be several shocks. Kuro scanned the faces of the doctors, looking for himself, but before he had a chance to check them all his eyes met the gray ones of the man lying on the second gurney.

He was the other patient. Kuro watched, rooted to the spot in shock, as his own chest rose slowly and fell, and then stopped moving altogether.

“Move! MOVE!” One of the armored people, a young Altean woman in pink with white hair, started shoving techs out of her way and forcing her way to the table with the dark-skinned man. “Lance!”

“Got it!” Kuro watched the third arrival, a young man in blue, force his way to his own body. He watched the man’s hands rest on either side of his head and begin to glow with the soft aqua light of quintessence, and realized he must have been Altean too. He certainly camouflaged it well.

“Come on, Curtis,” the woman muttered, her eyes closed and her hands on the other man’s temples. Her fingers glowed as well as she desperately tried to get results. “Come back to us, please…”

It went on for a few moments. The young man stopped first.

“Nothing,” he said softly, letting his hands fall away from Kuro. “We’re too late. There’s too much damage.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said in a small voice, letting go of the man they called Curtis to look at Shiro over in the doorway. “I tried to get to them. Sincline wasn’t fast enough, we didn’t get to the shuttle in time. They…”

She trailed off, and Kuro didn’t hear anything else. The whole image washed away like a falling tide, leaving him once again standing on the asteroid. His tablet was floating in front of him, released by numb fingers, and he could feel his heart pounding in his chest so hard it hurt.

That was how he was going to die. He’d just seen his own death.

Kuro could tell that he hadn’t been much older than he was now. A handful of years, maybe, if that. There were no details that he could remember, nothing sporting a date or time, that would give him a clue as to how long he had. But since there were humans there, and there weren’t humans here, he could deduce that at some point in the near future he was going to come across his own kind. He was going to leave the Quantum Abyss, and then he was going to die.

“Kind of puts a damper on the rest of the day, huh?” He asked Hoshi absently as she doggy-paddled past him sideways.

He retrieved his tablet and pulled back his probes, replacing everything back in the striker with Hoshi before packing up his tether and boarding his ship. He’d had a few hours of research planned for this afternoon but suddenly he didn’t feel very much like crunching numbers.

He felt nauseous, an alien feeling to a man who didn’t get sick, and by the time he touched back down at the facility he found himself bounding off the striker and into the nearest bathroom just in time for everything he’d eaten that morning to violently come back up.

* * * * * * * * * *

 _ **Current day**_ :

Allura sat back in her seat, her brain wandering. If she stared off into space and pretended everything was fine, maybe she wouldn’t worry about whether or not Shiro was going to manage to activate the Blue Lion again. She let herself drift, wishing life could be as safe and simple as it had been when she was a child.

“I’m sorry.”

Allura’s mind had been in a thousand different places, split in a hundred different ways, but none of those fractured pieces were focused on the present. Romelle’s voice, soft and reluctant, only barely caught her attention over the quiet sounds of Opal’s cockpit.

The Sincline’s ships were very different from the Lions, inside and out. Where Allura had reason to believe the Lions had been carved from sentient stone to mirror their true forms in metal, the Sinclines had been built first and attracted sentience after. They were sleek and powerful, built for speed and skilled combat, even after only a few hours in this pilot seat Allura felt more at home than she ever had in the Blue Lion.

Perhaps it was because she had built this ship. The controls under her fingers now had been partially designed and put together by her. She had personally soldered circuits, installed motherboards, programmed algorithms, run test scenarios. She had put her own blood and sweat into this final ship, right next to Lotor, had poured every bit of her creativity into its design.

The technology was Altean, but tweaked with ten thousand years’ worth of scientific advancements and a veritable hoard of knowledge from Oriande. Sitting here, in the pilot seat, Allura could easily look away from her viewscreen and pretend that she was home. That she was operating a ship up near Altea’s trade rings, waiting for a call from her aunt Orla that patrols were done for the day and to return to the guard base.

It would be almost dinner time now. Her father would be cleaning up the daily mess in his lab, and her mother would be cleaning up herself after an afternoon of sparring.

Romelle’s voice prodded that pretense away, bringing Allura stumbling back into the here and now. She opened her eyes and looked at her monitors, at the little red light on Romelle’s feed that said she was speaking on a private line. 

“For what?”

“All of this,” Romelle answered, gesturing to her own viewscreen. It was so strange to see the other woman not just in a pilot seat, but beginning to look comfortable there. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. Three decaphoebs wouldn’t have been wasted if I hadn’t caused this. Colony Two might be thriving by now, Earth never would have been attacked. We wouldn’t be sitting here waiting to see if Colony One will end up blown into pieces.”

Allura sighed and look back at her other screens. She could see Veronica talking to Pidge, and Hunk speaking to Lotor. Repairs to Sincline’s long range communications had been completed, and Hunk had taken point on questioning Lotor about his side of everything that had occurred.

She had to hand it to him, Hunk knew how to handle people. He was being very direct with his questions and keeping the conversation on the path he wanted it to be on, not letting anything get sidetracked by reluctance or half-truths. But he was inherently likable and difficult to get angry with, so although at points Lotor became visibly frustrated he wasn’t getting angry or being put off.

It was too bad she hadn’t let Hunk deal with the talking more often. He had a gift for putting people at ease, letting him deal with tense situations might have saved them a lot of pain and trouble since the Lions had begun flying with new Paladins.

“It’s not your place to apologize,” Allura said finally, turning back to Romelle’s face on her screen. “You did nothing wrong, you were a victim of an injury in the course of your duties. Everything you told us was in good faith and to the best of your knowledge at the time. None of the blame for this rests on you.”

“Tell that to the people on Colony Two,” Romelle said quietly. “If they’re still alive.”

“I will,” Allura answered solemnly. “When I give them my apologies and condolences and beg their forgiveness.”

She sighed, setting her communications so she could still hear the others but they couldn’t hear what she was discussing with Romelle.

“As a leader, the onus was on me to remain calm and investigate your claims. I did you a great disservice by allowing my anger to get the better of me, Romelle. Altea may have been gone for ten thousand years, but for me it was only a few months. The wounds from losing my home, my family, my friends…they’re still so very fresh, and they were more so six months ago.

“If I were an average person, my lapse could be forgiven. But while being a leader brings great privileges, it also brings with it a great deal of responsibility. It’s impossible to sow one without reaping the other, and I tried to get around that. I called myself a leader, and then when the time came for me to show it I failed. You were a victim of my bad judgement, you did nothing wrong.”

“So what happens now?” Romelle asked, frowning. “Going forward. I mean, will we be allies with Lotor, or go our separate ways…?”

“I don’t know,” Allura said honestly. “When this is all over, he and I are going to have to sit down and have a discussion. As much as I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Hey guys?” Pidge’s voice came over the comm, and Allura restored her volume.

“Yes?”

“I have Keith on the line. He’s in the colony.”

“He’s what?” Allura asked in surprise. “Keith! Are you insane? You should have waited for backup!”

“There was no time,” Keith sounded cranky, and when the visuals were finally established she could see why. He was a mess, probably from fighting his way through the colony. “Is everybody there? Where’s Shiro?”

“On the Atlas,” Hunk answered. “He ran into Honerva’s ship, wherever he was, and had to call for an extraction. She hit Blue with something that knocked her completely dead on her way through the wormhole, so we don’t have a ton of details…just what little he told us once they were in the hangar waiting for the medical team.”

“The medical team?” Keith asked worriedly. “Is he all right?”

“He seems to be,” Pidge answered. “Professor Wolfe’s definitely not. He’s getting him into a healing pod before he comes to join us. What’s your status?”

“We found about forty guards, they’ve all been released and are working with us to take the colony back completely,” Keith answered. “The command center is ours, we’ve blacked out their communications and made it impossible for them to effectively defend. I have their General here.”

He adjusted the view to show the woman standing near him and Allura only barely managed to contain a gasp. She could tell Hunk and Pidge were doing the same when they saw her, the red-haired woman who had tried to kill them on the Altean ship when they’d crossed realities acquiring the trans-reality comet.

“This is General Hira,” Keith made the unnecessary introduction so they didn’t have to explain how they knew of her. “She’s running the guard. They’ve taken about half the colony by n…hey guys, are your scanners picking this up?”

Keith didn’t have to divert their attention, Allura’s alarms were going off as a wormhole opened and a cruiser that used to belong to Lotor arrived through it. It was flanked by two of those mechs. She heard Pidge and Hunk sending an alert to Shiro as she ran her scanners, preparing to defend.

But the ship didn’t attack. The wormhole closed behind it and it drifted there, as did its mechs. Waiting, perhaps, but for what?

The Blue Lion reached them, falling in between Yellow and Green, and Shiro’s face appeared as Pidge added him to the group communication.

“Have they done anything since they arrived?” Shiro asked in reference to the ship and mechs.

“No,” Lotor answered. “She’s not the type to rush into anything. That was Zarkon, Honerva prefers to wait for a bit and get a feel for what’s going on before she acts. We likely have a bit of time before she makes her move.”

“Not nearly enough time, no matter how much it is,” Shiro muttered. “Keith…Pidge and Hunk said you’re inside the town. Care to enlighten us on what it looks like down there?”

“We’ve taken the colony command center, but this place is a bigger nightmare than we thought,” Keith looked pale as he spoke. Allura had fought beside him long enough to know he was likely trying to conceal an injury, but the look on his face told her this wasn’t the time to ask. “We have reason to believe the non-gifted adults and teenagers are in the planet’s psyferite mines. We could have a couple thousand Alteans captive in a nearby cave system.”

“I’m going to send some of my people in,” Hira declared from where she stood behind Keith. “Once we have access to some armor, some of the uninjured should be able to get to the mine entrances. It will take some time though, with all those Galra out there.”

“It might not have to. Coran, Curtis,” Shiro patched in the bridge of the Atlas, where Ina, Nadia, and Ryan were helping man the controls. Matt was leaning back against the wall behind the Captain’s dais. They had obviously been listening in without visuals and all looked very tense. “Can you two handle the ship with just Matt?”

“As long as things don’t get too crazy,” Curtis answered, glancing over at Matt. “So…probably not. But I can get Sam and Slav up here to give a hand, we should be able to manage then.”

“Good. Risavi, Kinkaid, Leifsdottir…get to your MFEs,” Shiro ordered as Curtis called down to Engineering. “Have an airman man a fourth. You’re going to drop in to the west under the cloud cover, those fighters are small enough to make it through that mess while the Galra are all looking for the Atlas and the Lions. Get the fourth fighter down to that colony and pass it off to Griffin. Griffin?”

“Here,” James leaned over into view on the screen.

“Once you have your fighter, take it from there,” Shiro told him. “You guys are going to lay down cover for Hira’s men, and for any Alteans they find and send out of that mine. Coordinate an evac, get those people back into the safety of the town.”

“Yes, sir,” James answered obediently. “But we have a more immediate problem concerning the town.”

“There are druids here,” Keith said. “They’re being made here.”

“What do you mean made?” Lotor had been quiet so far, but when he spoke now his voice carried an undercurrent of anger. He was furious at what was happening to his people, and to be honest Allura felt similar. It was as if she was watching the burning of Altea all over again.

“Hira?” Keith got up and move to the side so Hira could sit at the video console. From this better angle it was easier to see that she was far too thin and pale to be healthy after so long in captivity. But her eyes said it would take far more than being starved and tortured to hold her down for very long.

“I went with the other Paladin to check and see what the druids were up to here,” Hira told them. “We had always thought they were just young Alteans who had turned against us for the promise of power, but that’s not what we found. They were sealed in the med bay with none of the life support on, and what we found in the pods there were what looked like mummified bodies.”

“Let me guess,” Curtis frowned, glancing over toward Shiro before looking back to Hira. “They weren’t alone in the pods, there were creepy black cloud monsters in with them.”

“Yes,” Hira said in surprise. “They seemed to use the bodies as puppets, when they sensed us there they came out.”

“That’s exactly what Kuro and I saw on Honerva’s ship,” Curtis answered.

“Hold on,” Lotor interrupted. “You and who? On where?”

Curtis and Shiro both winced. Matt pumped a fist in the air in victory. “Yes! Somebody else screwed that one up before I did!”

“Why is Kuro here?” Lotor demanded. “He was not supposed to be brought into this.”

“Kuro and Bandor are waiting in the Atlas’ dignitary wing,” Shiro said placatingly. “There really isn’t anywhere safer they could be—“

“Bandor is here?” Romelle exclaimed. Curtis and Shiro winced again.

“Oh, I’m zero for two,” Matt held up a hand for a high five, slowly lowering it again when Ryan only looked at him with disinterest.

“Romelle’s brother is on the Atlas and you didn’t think that was important to share?” Allura asked. “And who is Kuro?”

“I didn’t have time to tell anyone anything!” Shiro defended. “I just got back and shoved my recently dead ex into a cryo tube and then horribly flirted my way back into this pilot seat, when was I supposed to tell you?”

On the Atlas, the very secure entrance to the bridge, which could only be accessed by security clearance card or biometrics, opened. A man walked in, completely oblivious to the fact that everyone on the bridge turned to stare. He had a very intrigued looking Slav curled around his shoulders, hanging in his face.

“See?” He was saying. “Completely identical down to the cellular level, same fingerprints and voice print and everything.”

“Oh my God!” Allura exclaimed before she could stop herself.

“Sven!?” Hunk and Pidge blurted out at the same time, beating her to it.

The man stopped and peeked around Slav, looking surprised to see he had an audience larger than he’d expected.

“Justin. Karen,” he answered them without missing a beat and looked to Curtis. There was no strange accent, while it looked startlingly like the version of Shiro they’d come across on their jaunt to an alternate dimension this was not Sven. “Is greeting people with the wrong name an Earth custom I don’t know about?”

“Is that a clone?” Allura demanded, looking between Shiro and Lotor. How could they possibly be so reckless after everything that had already happened? “Did you lose your mind and set loose a clone on the Atlas?”

The man in question looked up sharply, eyes that looked eerily like Shiro’s scanning the viewscreen as if in search of who had spoken. He apparently did not like that word.

“His name is Kuro,” Curtis said firmly but politely.

“Thank you, Curtis,” Kuro said, just as politely. He clearly still felt insulted.

“And he’s not supposed to be on the Atlas. He’s supposed to be safely back in the Quantum Abyss,” Lotor said pointedly. “Or, according to Shiro, safely settled in the dignitary quarter. Which he clearly is not.”

“I was, but Curtis said if I took out all the guards at my room I could come up here,” Kuro answered. Slav was frowning thoughtfully, poking at him and examining his features so closely their faces were practically touching. Kuro didn’t even seem to notice.

“That’s not what I said!” Curtis said in disbelief. “What did you do to those soldiers?”

Allura accessed the Atlas data banks, pulling up security footage from the dignitary quarter and patching it through to the others. The video of Kuro dispatching his assigned guard team wasn’t long, he took out all six in a little under eight seconds. He was also strong enough to force open the security door that was specifically made to be stronger than regular soldiers’ quarters, and even if it appeared that nobody was seriously injured it made her nervous.

“Why wasn’t he secured?” She demanded. “Why is he _still_ not being secured?”

“He’s not a threat,” Curtis answered, crossing his arms as he looked back at Kuro. “He doesn’t know how the hell to behave, obviously, but he’s not a threat.”

“They…” Kuro pointed back toward the door, in the vague direction of the soldiers he’d manhandled, but trailed off when Curtis tilted his head slightly and gave him a disappointed look. He deflated a little. “ _Sorry_.”

He did not sound sorry. Allura could see that she wasn’t the only one worried, either; Hunk and Pidge were clearly uncomfortable with the idea that there was a clone loose on the Atlas, and poor Keith would never say a word against Shiro but he was white as a sheet. Of course, he had more right than anyone to be upset after what he’d gone through with the previous clone.

“Does he need to be put into the brig?” Allura asked, turning now to Lotor. He looked surprised she was even speaking to him. “Does he have any kind of implants or prosthetics that will allow her to control him and put the crew in danger?”

Allura knew she didn’t have to specify who “she” was.

“If she could, she would have by now,” Lotor answered. “In fact, it’s odd that she hasn’t attacked yet.”

“We made some adjustments after…everything,” Pidge answered, careful not to look at Shiro or Kuro. “Allura, Hunk and I tweaked all of the Lions with some of the stealth technology the Sincline has, I don’t think she can pick us up. She’s probably hesitating because she doesn’t know if we’re here.”

“She has two mechs, she would have attacked the Atlas regardless,” Lotor said. “She wants Kuro or Shiro, both if she can manage it, I don’t think she wants to risk destroying the ship they might be on.”

“I suppose she wouldn’t have to worry about that if she could just control Kuro and bring him back, then,” Allura reasoned.

“You could always actually address me personally, you know,” Kuro said. “No, she can’t control me. Lotor never would have gotten out of Central Command with me if she could.”

“Excuse me,” Hira called them to attention and everyone fell silent. “I don’t know what this clone talk is all about, but right now druids are the issue we need to concentrate on. Look.”

She motioned to the side and Acxa lifted a little girl from where she had been curled in another seat. She was conscious but only barely, her head lolling to the side as if she were boneless. Hira rested the girl on her lap and tilted her forward, pulling up the back of her shirt to reveal the black mark running down her spine.

“She was in one of the pods, they were keeping her asleep but not in cryo. We think those black clouds are rift creatures from the quintessence field, and that she’s being used to incubate one until it can be put into the body of one of the gifted teens.”

“Even worse, Lance has a mark like this,” Keith chimed in. “Acxa said it ran down his back like this when he came out of the quintessence field with the Sincline, but now it’s just a small mark. If these things use people as incubators, I’m worried about what the mark fading might mean.”

“Like it might be an indicator whatever he’s carrying is ready to…uh, leave?” Hunk asked.

“Or like it’s ready to settle in more permanently,” Pidge frowned. “Where is he?”

“He ran off before we could stop him,” James answered. “He thought those druids would follow him, and so far it looks like they did. He said something about picking up something in the quintessence field that pissed them off.”

“They were very angry,” Hira agreed. “But not at me. When we woke them, they all went directly for Lance. They didn’t even seem to care that I was there.”

“Territorial?” Shiro suggested. “Maybe these things run in packs or something and don’t like outsiders?”

“We won’t know until we get it out of him,” Allura frowned. “Lance can probably keep them busy running after him for quite a while, but he can’t hold out forever. We need to get down there.”

“That might happen sooner than later,” Curtis interrupted, looking up from where he had accessed the communications console. “The Atlas is being hailed by Honerva’s ship.”

He looked at something on his screen then hit a few things on the controls. Allura saw a small light come up informing her that she had been muted.

“She would have hailed one of you if she’d picked you up, she must still not know you’re there,” Curtis said, moving to stand on the Captain’s dais. “I’m going to echo her signal out to you, but let’s keep you guys quiet. All right, here goes nothing.”

* * * * *

Kuro’s second instinct when Curtis announced they were being hailed by Honerva was to desperately find somewhere to hide and get out of view as fast as possible. It would have been difficult, given the distance to the bridge door, but might have been doable with some luck.

But his first instinct was what kicked in, canceling that. He locked up like a deer in headlights, his mind going completely blank with fear even as his muscles ran cold with the urge to flee. Out on the plateau he’d had a patient to focus on, someone else’s safety that was paramount. It had given him a bit more emotional strength and let him keep moving for Adam’s sake.

Here he had no such distraction. There was nobody who needed him enough to override his fear, leaving him frozen with one thing flitting through his mind.

_She’s going to see me, she’s going to see me, she’s going to see me, she’s going to see me…_

He barely noticed as Curtis moved quickly to the Captain’s dais, and the only thing that stopped Kuro from sinking completely into a mindless state of pure terror was the sudden feeling of his arms being unexpectedly yanked back behind him, and the feeling of restraints closing around his wrists.

“Hey!” He started to thrash, to try and pull free, but Curtis grabbed him by the back of his neck to make him be still.

“Relax!” Curtis hissed, giving him a light squeeze. “They said she’s looking for you, I need you to look like potential collateral.”

Curtis let him go and stepped back up onto the dais, opening the communications line. On the viewscreen, an image from the cruiser that they’d trespassed on at the plateau came up. Honerva sat in the Captain’s chair, flanked by two masked druids. The door that had been blown open right before Hoshi had saved them was still lying behind the chair on the floor.

“Where is your Captain?” Honerva demanded without preamble.

Kuro tensed when she spoke. Her voice was no different from any other person’s but it raked across him like jagged glass, conjuring memories of sharp instruments and painful punishments for disobedience. He felt like his blood was draining away from his extremities.

“Captain Shirogane isn’t present on the Atlas at this time,” Curtis answered.

“And yet, you are, with the boy and the copy,” Honerva observed. She looked back behind them at Matt first, then at Kuro when she said it. He felt the almost overwhelming urge to duck under one of the nearby consoles when their eyes met. “He was with you on the plateau, I find it hard to believe he would suddenly not be around now.”

“He was with us then, he’s not with us now,” Curtis answered calmly. “He gathered the Lions and they personally accompanied the Earth soldier we took from you to a secure medical facility. He and Captain Shirogane had a…pre-existing relationship that made the trip take precedence. But I believe you knew that already.”

Honerva was silent, judging his answer. To Curtis’ credit, he remained unmoved. The red-haired Altean man at the controls was relatively calm as well, though the others on the bridge were starting to squirm. Kuro remained still and defiant, but only because he had no other choice. His body wouldn’t respond, he couldn’t have moved even if his hands weren’t bound behind him and he didn’t have Slav wrapped around him like a frightened scarf.

“Give me the clone and you can have the colony,” Honerva said finally. “I have all the psyferite I need and I have no interest in the remaining Alteans.”

 _Give me the clone._ Those words chilled Kuro’s blood. He couldn’t go back to that lab with her, he absolutely could not.

Curtis let out a bark of unamused laughter.

“I’m not Captain Shirogane, lady. My loyalty is to the Earth military and the people under my command, no one else. We came here for Captain Wolfe and that’s it…Lotor’s no friend of the Voltron Coalition, you can have him and his rock.”

“If you won’t act with altruism, I may have to act with force,” Honerva warned.

“You’re welcome to try,” Curtis offered. “But this ship has wormhole capabilities, and I have no problem ditching this place and going straight back to Earth.”

He was borderline insulting, holding her in a carefully crafted contempt that was so out of character for Curtis that even Kuro knew it couldn’t be real. Until now Honerva hadn’t dealt with a professional military leader, she had only handled members of the Voltron team and rag-tag rebels from the Coalition. But rather than throw her weight around she paused again to reevaluate, trying to read Curtis’ weaknesses in the absence of experience with humans.

“Hand over the clone, and I won’t follow when you go,” she said finally. “I’m very capable of doing so, and you can’t defend against two of my mechs.”

“We’ve upgraded,” was all Curtis said in response to that threat. He nudged Kuro with his elbow. “And this is now the property of the Galaxy Garrison.”

Even knowing that a lot of it was for show on Curtis’ part, the exchange was starting to make Kuro feel sick to his stomach. The copy. The clone. This. No “he” or “him,” he had no identity in the context of this conversation. He was a thing being negotiated for. Little more than a vessel for the DNA she wanted, the container for an ingredient she was shopping for.

“You turn on your allies quickly once they’re no longer protecting your back on the battlefield,” Honerva noted.

“The enemy of my enemy isn’t my friend,” Curtis answered. “He’s just my enemy-in-law, and temporarily useful at best.”

Kuro didn’t move when he was nudged. Slav finally slid down off of him and disappeared under one of the consoles, but he remained standing right where he was. He was still terrified, but his initial flight or fight response was beginning to die down. He could breathe again, if he tried, and he could feel his body again enough to know that his hands were shaking.

Curtis glanced over at him, looking thoughtful, then stepped away from the Captain’s dais and moved forward to address Honerva.

“I might be convinced to hand him over…if you reciprocate.”

“Name your price and we’ll see.”

Kuro’s stomach dropped. He didn’t think Curtis would actually hand him over, but hearing the offer being made still made his heart beat faster. His vision started to cloud at the edges, he had to pull the restraints on his hands tight and make the metal dig into his wrists. The sharp pain brought back some clarity.

“The Atlas was recently attacked by one of yours,” Curtis answered, crossing his arms. “An Altean sleeper who infiltrated the Voltron team. Hand over Lance McClain so he can face justice for his treason on Earth, and you can have the clone.”

Honerva was silent again and Kuro tensed, waiting for her response. The witch was used to standing beside a ruler and getting her own way, there was no way she was enjoying Curtis’ penchant for telling her no.

“Very well,” Honerva said finally, surprising them all. “To the north a few thousand miles the terrain becomes open plain. You may land one shuttle and may send only one person in addition to the clone. You get no more than that, bind him more thoroughly if you feel one isn’t enough. You have twenty doboshes to arrive.”

“I don’t know or care what a dobosh is. We’ll get there when we get there,” Curtis answered. He reached over and hit something on the Captain’s console, killing the transmission

For a moment, Kuro wasn’t standing on the bridge of the Atlas. He was in what he now recognized as this ship’s med bay, with Shiro standing in the doorway and the woman he now knew to be Allura leaning over gurneys with the young man they’d just mentioned, Lance. Watching them work uselessly on two lifeless bodies: Curtis’ and his own.

_You may land one shuttle and may send only one person in addition to the clone._

Kuro felt his throat restrict. He couldn’t breathe. He started to get lightheaded.

_I’m sorry. I tried to get to them. Sincline wasn’t fast enough, we didn’t get to the shuttle in time._

Feeling was bleeding out of his body. His heartbeat was louder than anything else on the bridge, everything else was muffled.

“We’re not actually turning him over to her, right?” It sounded like Matt who asked, but Kuro couldn’t be sure.

“Absofuckinglutely not,” Curtis answered. “That woman’s insane and gunfire can’t kill her, we’re not going within miles of anywhere she’s going to be. Kuro…Kuro? Hey, are you all right?”

Somebody touched his arm. He felt his wrists being freed and it was like a switch, unlocking his frozen muscles. But they didn’t want to support him, and he felt himself starting to sink.

“I’m…I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” he slurred out, not even sure if he actually formed the words or just thought them. He was dimly aware of hitting the floor, and then everything finally went blank.

* * * * *

Kuro sank down behind the radar console, disappearing from view. Allura was sure he would have slammed into the floor full force if Curtis hadn’t caught him and lowered him down, taking a moment to check on him. None of the Paladins or Lotor said anything because they all recognized it for what it was; they had all seen Shiro react similarly at some point in moments when his trauma finally got the best of him.

But the situation was severe and there was no time to coddle. After a brief check, Curtis was back up.

“Slav, stop poking at him,” Curtis ordered as he crossed the bridge, sitting at his own console. Allura saw the red light finally go out as the Atlas unmuted their comm lines. “Okay, we’ve probably bought about twenty minutes to half an hour. She doesn’t know any of the Lions are down on the surface, and now she hopefully thinks we’re still a Paladin short. She probably figures Lotor’s not in the area either, since the Sincline was seen leaving the planet with the Blue Lion. So…now what?”

“Nobody’s going to that exchange, for one,” Shiro said immediately. “We already know it’s a trap because we know she doesn’t have Lance.”

“But she thinks that we think she does,” Hunk said. “And even if she did have him, it would just be a repeat of when they offered to exchange Sam for Lotor.”

“I think we should take advantage of this to distract her,” Matt interjected, moving forward to prod at Kuro with his staff.

“Stop poking at him,” Curtis repeated more firmly without turning around. Matt stepped away, looking unapologetic, as the bridge door opened again.

“Somebody should go down there, if for no other reason than to make her think Kuro’s there. If she wants him bad enough she’ll be focusing her attention there,” Matt suggested.

It was Sam who came through the door this time, with a young Altean man in tow.

“I lost Slav on my way here but I found…oh, his friend’s already here,” Sam said, stopping short of where Kuro was presumably lying on the floor.

“Bandor!” Romelle exclaimed excitedly.

“Romelle! …is he dead?” The Altean asked, tapping Kuro lightly with his foot.

“Stop pok—“ Shiro started to speak up, sounding irritated, but didn’t get a chance to finish.

“ _Stop poking at him_ ,” Curtis finally snarled, interrupting him and shocking everyone. “He just had to stare the person who tortured him in the eye, give him some damn space.”

Curtis shoved away from his station, irritably stalking across the bridge. He pulled off his uniform jacket and leaned over to drape it over Kuro, who was still out of view, before returning to his seat in just his t-shirt. He went back to typing furiously at his console, ignoring the looks he got for his outburst.

Bandor was the only person so far Allura had seen look genuinely apologetic during this whole sorry trash heap of a conference. Sam guided him over to one of the computer stations to establish a private line with Romelle thankfully, the current party call they had going on was already getting surreal to the point of absurdity.

“Launch the MFE fighters,” Shiro took control of the situation. “Hira, prep your people to go into the mines, you’ll have ally cover soon. Keith, do you have eyes on Lance?”

“We’ve been tracking him the best we can with the cameras that are available, but he’s pretty fast,” Keith answered. “He hasn’t been in view in a few minutes, but it looked like he was headed up to the cliff.”

“Then that’s where I’m going,” Shiro answered. “Sam, is he okay?”

Sam had left Bandor at the computer to check on Kuro. He rose back into view, adjusting his glasses.

“Yes, he’s coming around. He’s a little pale but he seems all right. He looks exactly like you, it’s absolutely fascinating.”

“Fascinating is one word for it. Get him down to the hangar,” Shiro ordered. “Allura…I know this isn’t going to sit well, but the safest place for him to be is in Sincline with you. If Honerva wants one of us then the mechs are the best place for us to be, Sincline’s the only one built with extra seats and harnesses.”

Allura rubbed her temple, wondering how she’d ended up here. Six months ago they’d liberated Earth and the path forward had seemed clear: prepare for war and continue taking down the Galra empire planet by planet with the coalition. Now she had potentially thousands of her own people down below on a colony surrounded by enough ships to kill them all if not destroy the planet. They were facing Lotor’s refitted cruiser Captained by Honerva herself, two of those ungodly mechs, a handful of druids on the ground, and Lotor sitting right in front of her.

And now on top of it, Shiro wanted her to babysit one of his clones. A clone who was apparently emotionally compromised enough by Honerva to faint after facing her.

Her father had never covered any of this in his lessons on how to be a leader. But then again, King Alfor had never had the unique pleasure of having such an odd species as humans thrown into his mix.

“Very well,” she relented as Sam helped Kuro to his feet. He did look a bit pale. She looked at her viewscreens, at the faces of Pidge and Hunk and Keith. None of them liked the idea of her having Kuro in her cockpit, but they didn’t want to say so. “My condition is that he’s completely disarmed. He doesn’t need weapons in here.”

“That’s fine,” Shiro agreed. “Curtis, you’re going to—“

“Take the Atlas to holding altitude above the meeting spot and make it look like we’re all in for the exchange,” Curtis finished the sentence for him without looking up from his screen.

“Yes. And if you can do so safely, try to—“

“Use the hologram camouflage technology Matt, Pidge, and Dr. Holt outfitted the landing shuttles with and add your biometric profile to create a dummy Kuro to at least throw her off from a distance.”

“…exactly. But try to stay out of firing range, and remem—”

“Remember we have special cargo in the medical bay that absolutely has to make it back to Earth.”

Shiro blinked, his eyes flicking around to the other comm feeds as if checking to see if he was the only one weirded out by that. Curtis finished what he was doing and rose from his station, turning away from the feed.

“Don’t look so shocked. I’ve been anticipating what you’ve wanted since the Atlas went live, it’s not my fault you never noticed before now,” he said, resting a hand on Kuro’s back and guiding him toward the bridge door. “Coran, set a heading for the exchange spot. Sam, Slav, give him a hand if he needs it. Matt, come with me so we can rig a shuttle with a hologram.”

They left the bridge. Shiro stared at his screen for a moment, then looked to the others.

“I guess this is it, then. As soon as those ships are in position for the exchange, we go. Hira’s men hit the mine, Jame starts the evac, I’m heading for the cliffs to help Lance. Allura, you’re going to escort Lotor’s shuttle down to the colony. Keith, you’ll help him and Acxa get the defenses up. Pidge, Hunk, follow me. Break away once we’re in the atmosphere and try to hold those ships off.”

“I hate to say this,” Pidge said carefully, “But I think Allura, Romelle, and Veronica should help Lance. You should stay with Hunk and me, Shiro.”

“She’s right,” Hunk agreed. “And Pidge should be on point. Keith had us run this exact simulation: Yellow, Green, Blue, and a sky full of ships. We should be handling the Galra, Pidge is actually really good at processing everything and recalculating strategy on the fly. You haven’t had Blue in combat yet and she’s probably really different from Black.”

“I agree,” Keith surprised them all by speaking up. “You’re the best leader Voltron’s had so far, Shiro, but trying to lead while also trying to master a new Lion doesn’t work. I almost got us all killed doing it when I switched from Red to Black, and both Lance and Allura almost ended up really hurt during that switch.”

“It’s nothing against you,” Allura agreed as she and the other women steered the Sincline toward the Atlas. She felt guilty, like she was pushing Shiro to the side somehow, even though she knew that wasn’t the intention any of them had. “Pidge can do this, she’s already had the practice for this situation. She knows what Blue can do and where you’ll be the most help. We’ll break down Sincline, I’ll help Lance while Romelle and Veronica escort Lotor.”

“Okay. It’s not really the time for me to argue,” Shiro gave in easily enough. Allura had a feeling it was because he currently cared more about the ‘special cargo’ in the Atlas’ medical bay than whether he was leading or following. “Pidge, I’ll follow your lead. Lotor, how long do you need to get this planet’s defenses up?”

“The shields can go up immediately as soon as the Galra are cleared from the town,” Lotor answered. Allura listened idly as Sincline disconnected, feeling the shifting as Opal reconfigured into the sleek shape of an Altean-Galran hybrid striker. “The older defenses are planetary and have never had to see action. I’ve kept them maintained, but they’ll likely be a slowly awakening giant.”

“What kind of defenses are we talking about?” Allura asked. Defense mechanisms on a planetary scale could be promising, but there was only a relatively small colony here and nothing else. There were not enough people here to man a defense system on the scale Lotor was hinting at.

“Quintessence recycling.”

“You’re going to tap into the planet’s quintessence pool?” Allura asked sharply. “You’re talking about potentially destroying gods only know how many cores.”

“It is not an action I take lightly,” Lotor answered. “I have never sacrificed the lives of my people on a whim and I do not intend to sacrifice the souls of the dead if I can help it. But if it’s the only way to save the ones who live and breathe then so be it.”

“Tapping the planet’s quintessence pool,” Pidge frowned. “So, draining the planet and converting it into offensive force? Isn’t that exactly what those mechs do?”

“It is,” Lotor confirmed. “You’ve been to Naxzela, obviously. This planet has the same terraforming technology, so does Colony Two. You supply the mechanism with quintessence and it forces it into the planet, creating life. If reversed, the mechanism draws the quintessence back out.”

“To be used to turn the dead planet into a bomb,” Allura added. She remembered Naxzela all too well.

“Not necessarily,” Lotor disagreed. “That’s what Haggar did to Naxzela, but the planet’s quintessence can be tapped in moderation to power anti-offensive weapon systems. With luck, the kind of firepower that will kill the planet won’t be necessary. However…we’re going to need somebody gifted to use it.”

He looked pointedly to Allura, and she wasn’t surprised. If the tech ran on alchemy and Colony One was now home to non-alchemists, she was the logical choice.

“I’ll pick up Lance and join you,” she promised. “I’ll see what we can do.”

The Atlas’ Lion hangar door loomed in front of her ship, the airlock starting to open. Opal glided in with barely a touch of his controls, as aware and helpful as Blue had ever been, and came to land gently just inside as everything closed up behind her. She closed out her video feeds but left on the audio to listen to the chatter of the others as they planned their moves, while the time to the fake prisoner exchange ticked down. Allura sank down in her seat, letting out a heavy breath. She felt very tired.

“Psst.” Allura glanced down at her comms to find Veronica with a devilish grin. “So, it looks like you’re passing off Space Daddy and picking up Star Daddy instead.”

The statement was so ludicrous and unexpected, Allura had trouble keeping herself from bursting out laughing. She pursed her lips, trying to stop the inelegant noises that escaped, and saw that Romelle was doing the same. Now that they understood the horribly inappropriate meaning of the phrase it was hard not to find it funny.

“I think this one has pierced ears,” Allura answered, letting the banter help ease some of the apprehension she felt at being in close quarters with a clone. “Upgrade or downgrade?”

“Upgrade,” Romelle decided. “But that could be my Colony One fashion sense talking.”

“I think he had on nail polish,” Veronica said. “All in all, he looks like he wears leather when he’s not armored.”

“I wonder if he has tattoos?” Romelle offered. “Most of the Earthlings I’ve seen that wore leather liked tattoos.”

“Hm,” Veronica said thoughtfully, stroking her chin in an exaggerated fashion. “That back, those shoulders…I hope so. Rawr.”

“Guys,” Shiro’s voice came over the comm link, exasperated. “You’re not muted.”

The three women fell silent. Allura looked back and forth between Veronica and Romelle, their eyes wide in a way that she knew reflected her own horror. She felt all of the stress of the last day come to a head and overflow, escaping in a soft giggle.

That touched off Romelle, who let out a snort. She slapped both hands over her mouth but it was too late, Veronica’s dam already burst and she started laughing. Allura couldn’t hold it in, she started laughing as well and then so did Romelle, and then all three pilots were laughing hysterically. Allura watched Romelle slide down, falling out of her seat, and Veronica curl up in her chair and hug her stomach.

Allura couldn’t breathe. She felt tears starting to run down her face and had to struggle to compose herself. It took a minute or so before they all managed to calm down and Allura finally addressed the others.

“Sorry,” she said with a little cough. “We forgot boys have delicate sensibilities.”

“You’re good,” Keith’s voice came over the line, still subdued from whatever injury he was hiding from them. “It’s a little weird for me to have an opinion, but I think Griffin agrees the back and shoulders are very tattooable.”

It sounded then like James punched Keith. Allura didn’t get to see where that odd line went, the door to the hangar opened to admit Curtis and Kuro. Technically nobody who wasn’t a Paladin should have been able to get in here, but Kuro’s fingerprints clearly could access anything Shiro had clearance for. That was also concerning.

Allura opened Opal’s canopy and climbed out, dropping to the hangar floor as the two men approached. Curtis was still in just his t-shirt, his uniform jacket draped over Kuro’s shoulders. She hadn’t noticed over video because of the dark color of the armor that matched Lotor’s, but in person Allura could see Kuro was also wearing a copious amount of dried blood.

A little bit concerning in and of itself.

“It’s fine, it happens,” Curtis was saying as they approached. “You don’t need to be embarrassed.”

“You didn’t faint in front of an audience,” Kuro answered. “I should’ve just gone back to the Abyss as soon as I let you guys loose. But no, I had to stick around to see if there was anything exciting going on, and now I’m right in the worst possible place for me to be.”

They reached her and Kuro shrugged the uniform jacket off, offering it back to Curtis. There was some difference between him and the last clone. Kuro was about the same height but not as bulky, and the way he held himself was missing something. Although Allura thought it was probably strange to think of Shiro as an imposing man he certainly was when he wanted to be, but Kuro didn’t have any of that.

It didn’t really have as much to do with build though as personality. Allura barely knew Kuro at all but she could see the difference in his person on his face. Shiro was a man who, while rather young, had not smiled very much in his life and it showed. Kuro had his own little nicks and scars, but he looked like a man who smiled quite a bit.

“Princess,” Curtis greeted her as he pulled his jacket back on. “Ryou Kurogane. Kuro, this is Princess Allura.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t like me,” Kuro observed. He was not a subtle man.

“We had a bad experience with one of Honerva’s subjects a little over half a year ago,” Allura answered, meeting his bluntness with her own. “I’m cautious nothing more. Prince Lotor and Shiro are both vouching for you, as does Curtis seem to be. Act the man they claim you are and we’ll get along fine.”

Kuro raised his eyebrows, his eyes dropping down to take her in again from the floor up in her entirety. The silence stretched on for a moment before he looked back at Curtis.

“I like her,” he said, looking back to Allura. “I like you. You have that “I’ll punch you in the face” vibe.”

“Please don’t punch him in the face,” Curtis requested. “I assure you, you’ll be tempted. But please don’t.”

“I’ll try,” Allura made no promises. She stepped back out of the way and motioned to the cockpit. “Client before bodyguard, I suppose.”

Kuro took a step toward Opal but stopped, looking back at Curtis.

“You guys aren’t actually going down to the surface, right?” He asked. “You’re just sending down a shuttle?”

“We might have to send someone down to make it look realistic,” Curtis answered with a slight shrug. “I don’t know yet if we can work the hologram that well from here.”

“No no no,” Kuro twisted back around and grabbed Curtis’ sleeve, looking genuinely worried. “Don’t send anybody down there in person. Don’t. Acting like a badass over the comm line where she can’t reach you is one thing, but you saw her back there.”

“Oh, come on,” Curtis gently removed Kuro’s hand from his sleeve so he could adjust the jacket and finish buttoning it. Allura got the sense he was being intentionally light about the situation to try and soothe Kuro’s nerves. “She’s practically alone and this time we have the Atlas backing us up. She can’t mind control a whole ship before she gets blown up, how bad can this be?”

“You’d be surprised,” Kuro protested. “Her illusions and mind tricks don’t work on me, but I only know that because she was trying to use those once and I managed to get in some hits. But once the shock wore off she obviously won without them, or Lotor wouldn’t have found me strapped to a table. If you absolutely need to send someone, make it some unimportant soldier she’ll be more likely to let go than take as a hostage. Promise you won’t go down.”

“Okay, fine,” Curtis relented. “I’m not going down there.”

“ _Promise_.”

He was really starting to get upset. Allura looked from Kuro to Curtis, wondering if he was having the same disconnect as she was seeing a man who could be Shiro acting very not like Shiro. But if Curtis was thrown off by it, he hid it much better. He put his hands on Kuro’s shoulders to calm him down.

“Okay, I promise. Nobody’s going down there.” He gently turned Kuro around and steered him to the Sincline ship’s side, turning back to Allura as he got inside.

“So what exactly is the story with him?” Allura asked quietly, watching Kuro sink down miserably into the second cockpit seat. “What do we know about him?”

“Well, he’s a doctor,” Curtis answered, keeping his voice down and counting off on his fingers. “He loves animals. He’s a vegetarian. He’s a Boh Bi Bih, that’s apparently his Bih Boh astrological sign since he doesn’t know what the sky looked like on Earth the day he was made. He won’t eat cheese because he doesn’t trust non-Earth milk in case he has some kind of intolerance. And he’s not shy about showing off the birth mark Matt and I can now never forget Shiro has. It’s heart-shaped.”

“All…very important facts,” Allura said haltingly, looking back and forth between Curtis and Kuro. “But I meant more along the lines of is there anything I should be aware of, besides the fact that Honerva wants him back.”

“Oh, right.” Was it her imagination, or did Curtis look like he might be blushing a little? His complexion was dark and it was difficult to tell. “Um. He’s been living in the Quantum Abyss since you guys fought Lotor. Lotor and Acxa found him in Honerva’s lab and took him when they escaped, they dropped him at the facility in the Abyss and left to meet you guys. He’s pretty much spent the last fifteen years alone on a rock in the middle of nowhere.

“He has no sense of fear for anything until it hurts him first, so watch out for that. He doesn’t have Shiro’s memory except for a few things from childhood and his piloting skills, so don’t treat him like they’re the same person or he’ll sulk. That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. Oh, and he doesn’t like to be touched without permission, I think the guards patting him down is what made him decide to knock them all out.”

Allura looked back at Kuro, who was still sunk down in his seat. Fifteen years in the Quantum Abyss, and Keith and Krolia had their fair share of horror stories about only two. As much as she knew this man to be a clone of Shiro, he was not some copy fresh off the line. He had lived his own life for more than a decade.

That quieted some of her fears. If Kuro was a puppet for Honerva somehow, he would have acted long before now. He likely would have been serving her in Voltron’s absence during the time dilation. And according to Kuro himself, he was somehow immune to her illusions. That might come in handy.

“He’s not armed?” She verified. She did not have to be stupid to be compassionate.

“Not armed.”

“All right. I need to get back to the others. How much longer until you head to the meeting spot?”

“About fifteen more minutes. Matt’s working on the shuttle,” Curtis answered. “As soon as the whole charade starts we’ll give you the word, and you move in.”

Allura nodded and climbed back into Opal. Curtis headed back to the hangar door as she taxied to the airlock, glancing back at Kuro in the small rear view mirror above the viewscreen for that purpose. He had put on his harness and he was leaning lazily to the side, watching Curtis leave.

She felt a slight pang in her chest as she recognized that look on his face. It was a harsh sort of pining that she’d seen in the mirror before, a longing to remain in the presence of one’s own kind after a long separation. Curtis, Matt, and Shiro were the first other humans Kuro had likely encountered in his life, and now he was leaving them behind. It was highly likely, Allura knew, that he wouldn’t see them again. Lotor would probably want him stowed back safely away in the Abyss when the current battle was over.

“Coming back to you,” Allura announced to the others, opening her comm lines back up as the inner airlock door closed and the outer opened to let Opal shoot out into open space. “Cargo is locked down tight, I’ll be with you in a few ticks. The Atlas should be in place in about fifteen minutes, so let’s all get into position.”

Kuro’s face came up in the top corner of her comm screen, showing her that Veronica had activated his camera by calling through to his line.

“Hi,” she greeted.

“Hi.”

“Do you wear leather?” Veronica asked immediately.

“Do you have tattoos?” Romelle followed up.

Allura groaned. Kuro stared at Veronica and Romelle for a moment to gauge if they were serious before Allura saw him brighten ever so slightly.

“No small talk. I like you guys, too.”

“Enough of the chatter, please,” Allura requested as Opal joined Jade and Carnelian. “Veronica, Romelle, join back up with me. As soon as the Atlas gives the order, Sincline will dive with Lotor. We’ll break again just above the colony, you get him down there safely and I’ll go find Lance.”

“ _Oh, Jesus Christ_ ,” Allura heard Kuro mutter under his breath as Opal started to shift for Sincline formation. She glanced up at the rear view and saw him sitting tensely, gripping the arm rests of his seat. She supposed she should have warned him.

“I’m taking over movement again,” Allura announced once they were joined. “Handle the weapons. Romelle, keep the right clear, Veronica you’re on the left. If anything even turns to face that shuttle on the way down, blow it out of the sky. Lotor?”

“Ready when you are, Princess.”

“Good. I’m sending you coordinates, let’s move in.”

Allura let Lotor punch in his trajectory and start moving, then followed behind. Veronica and Romelle were quiet now, focused on their mission, and even though another glance told her Kuro was fidgeting he remained silent. Which was good, even with half of that armada gone she was still going to have to concentrate. Blue had given her a feel for piloting a sentient ship but Opal had a mind—and personality—all his own.

As they got closer to the planet and Allura paid more attention she could feel it, impatience with an undercurrent of irritation. Something here was rubbing Opal the wrong way, and she was certain she knew what it was. The Sincline ships were repelled by Lotor but attracted to her, it undoubtedly had something to do with their alignment as well as their personalities. Opal was likely reacting adversely to Honerva’s presence, and to those of her druids, being nearby.

They reached a point above the planet, just out of scanning range of the Galra ships, and Allura darkened her cockpit. She rested her hands on her controls and waited in tense silence, ready, until the comm lines sounded with Curtis’ calm voice.

“The shuttle was just launched and is on its way down to the surface,” he announced. “Honerva’s ship and the mechs are here. A pod just left it and is on its way down to meet the shuttle…go.”

Allura didn’t wait to see if anyone else was moving, she trusted them to have all been ready. She waited only until she saw Lotor’s vessel start to dive, and then she threw her accelerator forward and followed suit.

* * * * * * * * * *

Keith watched on the cameras as Hira and James ran down the stairs and out of the building, out into the middle of the bridge where an MFE came in to hover. The chain link aerial ladder dropped down and one of the Atlas junior pilots climbed out, passing the plane on to James. Around the colony the three other MFEs circled, sticking close enough to the ground to weave in and out of terrain obstacles and keep from being of interest to the Galra ships that had started to drop down into the atmosphere but were still fairly high up.

He could hear Hira over the communication line, calling soldiers by name and ordering them to armor up and head to the mines. James’ voice came over the line next once he was in his plane, giving orders to help clean out the town from above until the Alteans were ready to leave its borders for the caves to the west.

He hated sitting here. He hated knowing that for the moment he was of no use in the fighting. His injured arm slowed him down too much and made him a liability, those fighting with him would be more worried about him than themselves.

So he sat here, waiting to see if he could be of assistance to Lotor. Staring at the viewscreen, flicking repeatedly through camera views. Looking for something, anything, that would let him know Lance was okay. All he wanted was a quick glance to see that the other Paladin was still safe and moving. He’d moved out of range for the small communicator Acxa had given him to work, so there was no way to get even a verbal update.

He wondered, again, if this was how the others had felt when he’d left them behind for Blade of Marmora missions. He’d never given a thought to how Shiro might feel to have his little brother disappear for days at a time, or how his friends might feel when he’d left the team completely. Keith supposed this was karma, having to sit here and wait while others were in potential danger and being able to do nothing but trust in their abilities.

Acxa was booting up the basic defenses, the colony had a particle barrier that she was preparing to put up as soon as the Galra ground forces were driven out. Keith couldn’t even help with that, he didn’t know enough about the colony’s capabilities.

“ _…ese coordin…art, then we’ll di…_ ”

The staticy sounds echoed Pidge’s voice as he watched her give directions to Hunk and Shiro on the viewscreen. Keith looked around for the source.

“ _…gether. Hunk, you’ll be on my left, Shiro, stay to my right. You guys are more armored, the less direct fire Green takes the more resources she can put into her scanners._ ”

His helmet. It was sitting to the side where he’d dropped it, but now the communications from the Lions were beginning to come in clear. Keith turned to the computer and quickly tried to stumble through the unfamiliar operating system until he found the atmospheric scanners.

The current storm over the bunker had dissipated. They were in the window between storms.

“Farla, Tiselle,” Keith shot up from his seat, startling Acxa as he leaned forward and talked louder as if that might make them act quicker. “Get back to the transport right now. Camille, are you there?”

“Here.”

“Get them and Ariella back to the bunker. Get there as fast as you can and open the hangar doors so the Black Lion can launch.”

“What about the storm?”

“The wind speeds are down,” Keith answered. “We have about an hour before nothing can go in and out again, so get there fast.”

“It shouldn’t take us long to get back,” Camille said thoughtfully. “With four less people we’ll go faster. Maybe twenty doboshes.”

“You have fifteen,” Keith said. “Our people will be distracting Honerva with a fake prisoner exchange at that point, and as soon as it starts all hell is going to break loose down here.”

“Honerva is here?” Camille asked worriedly. Keith had forgotten Camille hadn’t been in on the comm meeting and was mostly in the dark.

“She’s here,” Keith confirmed. “But Lotor is here too, he’ll be coming down soon to start activating the colony defenses.”

“And your friend?”

“Friend?”

“The sad one,” Camille answered. “With the brown skin and the mechanical eyes. He went with Lotor, we needed him to repair the Lorelia’s communications.”

“Adam?” Keith paused. “He was hurt. They brought him back but he’s in a healing pod on the Atlas, the comm parts will have to wait. What’s the range on your working ones? Will we be able to reach you on them once you’re out of range of the portables?”

“Planetary or so,” Camille answered. “You were just out of range when the Romelle stopped you on your arrival. The next storm will probably come through before whatever’s going on is over, but you should be able to reach us when it clears.”

“Good. Then get back there and stay safely underground….Honerva brought two of those mechs of hers so things might get messy. I thought the qualified pilots were in the group you took from the outpost?”

“They are. Ariella is a tech prodigy, she was Honerva’s best,” Camille answered. “Farla and Tiselle were meant to pilot the two that were under construction. There were six more at the base on Altea Beta, but all of their pilots are here in the bunker.”

“Is there anyone at all left who would be qualified to pilot those? They’re probably going to be at the exchange, I need to know what kind of skills we’re looking at.”

This time it was Camille who paused. He heard her make a soft noise as she ran names through her head, and then she gasped quietly.

“Your ship needs to be very careful at that exchange, and under no circumstances can they make it known that Adam is on board or that Lance is at the colony.”

“Why?” Keith asked warily, looking over at Acxa. She had stopped what she was doing and was listening, and he saw realization flicker across her face. “What’s going on?”

“It’s probably Haran and Natille in those mechs,” Acxa said. “They won’t be uninjured and they won’t be happy. Adam locked them in an office on the outpost and left them there to die and Lance was there with him, and they’re not likely to have forgotten so quickly.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Curtis stood on the Atlas bridge in front of the Captain’s dais, leaning back against the console. He watched on the viewscreen as the shuttle descended, listening to Coran rattle off readings about the atmospheric conditions and the weather on the ground. Matt sat at the communications console, muttering to himself in a way Curtis bad begun to assume was just standard for stressed out Holts.

“This would be a lot easier if you’d just let me go down there,” Matt complained. “I’m not a simulator pilot, it’s hard to make the right adjustments without being there in person.”

“I made a promise,” Curtis answered. “Shiro said to do this as safely as possible and Kuro said not to send anyone down. I’m going to trust the men who’ve been face to face with this psycho.”

“What do you think she’s going to do?” Matt asked. “We saw she doesn’t have a crew, it was just her and those two creepy druids.”

“And you heard Shiro tell us she pulverized an entire outpost and set half a planet on fire,” Curtis said. “Look, I’m sorry, I’m not a Paladin and I’ve never been traipsing across the universe. There are thousands of lives on this ship and down in those mines, I’m not going to start taking unnecessary risks just because it might be a little more exciting.”

“Okay, okay,” Matt grumbled, letting out a huff. He went back to remotely piloting the shuttle, and Curtis turned back to the viewscreen.

“Honerva’s pod is halfway down,” Sam announced. “Our shuttle will be touching down in forty seconds.”

“Activate the hologram program,” Curtis ordered. “And everyone cross your fingers.”

Honerva’s ship remained stationery, the two mechs hovering by it. The pod landed about twenty yards from where the Atlas’ shuttle touched down, and the two vessels remained silent as the moments stretched on.

“I guess she’s waiting for us to come out first,” Matt supposed.

“It might just be me, but something doesn’t feel right about this,” Coran said. “Can’t put my finger on it, something just seems off.”

“I agree,” Curtis frowned. “But there’s no way of knowing what until it actually bites us in the ass. Send out the rover.”

The ATEV, or All Terrain Exploration Vehicle, was a small four-wheeled robot outfitted with top of the line audio-visual feeds. They were made to be dropped down to planet surfaces to check for threats before a human team went in, and so far had only been tested on Earth. This was the ATEV’s maiden expedition, and its job was to carry a portable projector. As it moved out the shuttle door and down the exit ramp, it appeared from a distance that Kuro and Curtis had stepped from the vessel.

The pod’s door opened as well, but nobody stepped out. Coran turned to look at Curtis, and he knew the Altean was starting to get as jumpy as he was.

“Coran, prepare to run,” he ordered. “Sam, scan the whole area for life signs.”

“Nothing on the pod,” Sam answered after a moment. “She called our bluff.”

“Check her ship.”

“Nothing there, either,” Sam said. “The only life signs are on the pilots in the mechs.”

“Oh, damn it,” Curtis jumped the dais to get behind the console, opening up the comm lines. Even as he did, the mechs started to move. “Shiro!”

“Here,” Curtis could hear Shiro answering through clenched teeth, and the sounds of the Blue Lion’s sensors and alarms going off in the background.

“You have trouble. Honerva’s not here, she must’ve sent her ship by remote. She’s not on the pod and she’s not on her cruiser, she’s probably on the ground by you.”

“Copy that. Get out of there.”

“Yeah, we’ll get right on tha—”

The Atlas took its first hit of the fight as one of the mechs opened fire. Curtis slapped off the communication lines and turned all of his console’s resources and screens to monitoring the status of the ship.

“Particle barrier up!” He ordered.

“Weapons are locked,” Sam announced.

“Hold off on those,” Curtis requested. “The last one we fired on just absorbed the blast and sent it back to us.”

His screen flashed red with an alert as the particle barrier took another hit. Curtis checked his screen.

“I’m only seeing one,” he noticed. “Where’s the other one?”

“Gone,” Matt answered. “Probably heading back to help Honerva, she obviously knows the Lions are here.”

“How many hits from that thing can we take?” Curtis asked.

“Normally? Not many,” Sam answered. “But the pilot in this one doesn’t seem to be as good as the one we faced. It may be a back up pilot, or somebody who’s been trained and had no practice. The hits don’t have the same force.”

“The pilot’s likely a child,” Coran pointed out. “The Paladins’ age at the oldest. Voltron at least has the advantage of being completely linked with their Lions, not all of the Altean pilots may be as skilled as Ariella.”

“Hail it.”

Matt looked at him as if he were crazy, but sent the communication request. The mech landed a few more blows on the particle barrier without answering and Curtis kept his eye on their shield levels. Even if this pilot wasn’t as skilled as they could be, they were still being worn down.

“Open the channel,” Curtis tried, watching for the indicator to come up on his screen that they were broadcasting. He needed to know if there was a chance of ending this without having to hurt a kid. “Altean Pilot, this is acting Captain Curtis Duchesne of the IGF Atlas. There’s no need to attack us, we are not an aggressor.”

“That sounds more like your problem than mine,” a young voice answered. The hail was finally answered, a visual coming up on the screen. The pilot was about Lance and Hunk’s age, a girl with aqua colored hair. Half of her face was badly burned, and although she was covered from the neck down in a pilot uniform he could see that the injuries spread down at least as far as her hand. “You shouldn’t have trespassed on Altean ground.”

The mech’s staff hit the particle barrier, and this time it was a hard strike. The power levels dropped considerably as the mech drained the energy right from the barrier, causing it to flicker. Sam was trying to divert power to keep the shield up, but even with three balmera crystals the Atlas still couldn’t generate enough to counteract the mech.

Just as the barrier went down completely, the mech shot upward, away from the ship an up toward the atmosphere.

“What is she doing?” Matt wondered, scanning the sky and trying to get a lock on her. “These damn things are too small and fast to follow…is she prepping for a charge?”

“No, it looks like she’s running from something,” Slav volunteered. “And perhaps we should do the same.”

“This is the one time I agree with Slav,” Curtis frowned. “Something’s still not right. Take us up, and fast.”

The Atlas started to rise, but it didn’t get far. Down below, the pod suddenly let out a violent flash, a wave of light flying outward. It hit the ship as it passed, and all of the systems started to shut down.

“What the hell was that?” Curtis demanded.

“Looks like an EMP wave,” Matt answered. “Not big enough to leave us immediately dead in the water, but it definitely took out almost all of our systems. We’re going down, we have no choice but to use what we’ve got left to land.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have a chance to land,” Coran warned. “That mech is coming back now that the EMP wave is over.”

He brought up the trajectory of the incoming hostile. The EMP had basically made them sitting ducks, easy for even a less skilled pilot to take out. The ship was going down, they had no power to fire weapons, and even if they did that thing would just absorb it and shoot it back. The Atlas was between a rock and a hard place, that mech was coming and it was coming fast. With enough momentum, it was going to tear right through the ship.

Alarms were going off everywhere, which just made concentrating harder. He had Matt and Sam trying and failing to come up with a defense, and Coran asking him what they should do. Curtis had to close his eyes to block out all the stimuli, to try and use the few seconds he had to come up with something, anything.

He had to think like Shiro, come up with some kind of last minute offense and hope for a miracle that it would work.

Or, rather…he had to think like Adam, and do something that made very little sense and wasn’t expected.

“Use the jump crystals,” Curtis ordered, opening his eyes. “Open a wormhole between us and her, doesn’t matter where you send her.”

“I could do that, but I strongly advise against it,” Coran answered, starting up the teludav. “The back of the wormhole will be facing the planet. You’re talking infinite mass, the gravitational waves it will give off will tear the planet apart.”

“Then…open two and put them back to back,” Curtis said. Coran whirled around to face him.

“Are you mad? Do you have any idea what opening two wormholes that close together will do?”

“No!” Curtis answered, gesturing wildly to his communications station. “I answer intergalactic phone calls, I don’t do physics! Do you know what happens?”

Coran paused. He briefly looked like he was trying to answer that question.

“Actually, no,” he said turning back to his screen and activating the jump crystals. “But I suppose within the next few minutes we’ll either know or we’ll be dead.”

“On the bright side, we’re probably going to die really, really fast,” Matt winced.

“Or suffer a gravitational force similar to a black hole that will stretch us out infinitely and leave us to die slowly over time until the complete collapse of this universe,” Slav offered.

“Get out,” Matt commanded him, pointing to the door.

The mech had closed the distance and was right on top of them. Curtis braced himself for the impact, but at the last second there was a flash of blue light as a wormhole opened between them and the attacking vessel. It was brighter than usual, thanks to the second wormhole lined up right behind it. The flicker in its halo told Curtis exactly when the mech went through.

“Get ready to close them both!” Curtis warned, silently urging his computer to hurry as he took the coordinates of the wormhole and plugged the distance in to calculate the travel time.

One. Two. Three.

He counted silently as he waited. His screen lit up with the response: four seconds.

Four seconds there, two seconds from one’s exit to the other’s entrance, four seconds back. The mech’s momentum wouldn’t allow it to stop before it came back through.

Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine…

“Close them!”

Coran slammed a control on his console and the wormholes flickered out. In that instant the mech started to come back through, only to be severed in half by the closing exit. Its top half flew past the Atlas, barely missing it, and slammed into the ground in a crater that threw dust up into the air.

“It’s…down,” Sam announced, sounding as if he didn’t believe it. Honestly, Curtis didn’t believe it either. He was half certain they were all actually dead and just didn’t know it yet.

“There’s no time to celebrate, get a lock on that thing,” he said. “Any readings?”

“None yet,” Matt answered, already pulling off his harness and getting out of his seat. “But there will be in a few seconds once that nutjob sets off the self-destruct if she’s conscious.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Curtis answered, shoving away from his computer and running for the door. “Sam, Coran, use what’s left in the crystals to land this thing and then start the reset to get her back in the air. Bandor, you’re with Matt and me. Let’s go, hustle!”

There was an emergency exit right down the hall from the Bridge. Curtis broke the glass on an emergency lock and opened the compartment near it, pulling out two booster packs. He tossed one to each of the young men with him and pulled one on himself, barely locked in with the helmet and screen in place before he was shoving open the exit.

Matt dove out first. Bandor hesitated, so Curtis very kindly turned his pack on and gave him an unexpected shove out the door. He followed, catching up with Bandor and grabbing the top of his booster to help steer him where they needed to go.

“There it is,” Matt’s voice came over the comm speaker in the escape helmet. “I’ve got a countdown signal for the self-destruct.”

“How long?”

“Thirty-five seconds.”

That wasn’t much. They were basically in free fall with the boosters giving them some direction, it took them another seven seconds to reach the ground. They all stumbled a bit on their landing then started the all-out sprint toward the fallen mech, making it there in what Curtis counted to be five more seconds.

He was taller and in better shape than both of them so he reached the fallen mech first, relieved to see the design was still the same as the one they had been reverse-engineering back on Earth. He had seen the specs, it only took him another three seconds to find the emergency release and open the cockpit.

The pilot was still conscious, but only barely. Curtis hauled her out and basically threw her to the ground, waving wildly to Bandor.

“Get in!”

“What?”

“Get in!” He grabbed the young man’s arm and shoved him down into the pilot seat. He and Matt started quickly putting the sensors in place. “You have to be gifted to work it, we need you to shut it down!”

“I don’t know how to shut it down!” Bandor said in a panic. “I’ve only ever flown a cargo ship, not a murder robot!”

“Ten seconds, figure it out!” Curtis warned.

“Oh God, oh God,” Bandor squeaked, running his hands through his hair. He looked at the controls with wide eyes. “I should’ve stayed home, you humans are all insane!”

“Reverse the power flow!” Matt exclaimed. “Didn't Lotor say this thing’s basically a small-scale terraformer?”

Bandor looked briefly blank, then his face lit up with understanding.

“Oh,” he blurted, looking around at the controls again. They started to light up as he reached out, alchemically activating the ones he recognized. “OH! Oh, oh!”

“Three seconds,” Curtis counted, tensing as he waited for what looked to be their imminent demise. Bandor started hitting buttons. “Two seconds…one second…”

He hit one last button and threw a switch forward. Curtis felt the impact as the mech started to shake, and his stomach dropped as he waited for the explosion. Instead, the mech’s core started to glow, and it began to discharge its quintessence into the area around it. The air felt staticy and got so hot so quickly Curtis almost thought he’d have a burn.

When the light finally dissipated into faint sparks, all three of them were left sitting around he cockpit in varying states of surprise. Their hair was sticking up from the static, and Curtis was pretty sure he was bordering on a stroke.

He let himself fall backward against the hull of the mech, looking tiredly over to where the Atlas was coming in for a gentle landing.

“I’m way too old for this."


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence warning. Big battle, lots of bones breaking and stabby stabbing. Proceed with caution if this bothers you, it's peppered throughout much of the chapter.
> 
> Fingers crossed it's not a mess. We're now in the final stages of part II!

The rain of laserfire began as soon as they broke the atmosphere, filling the sky with almost undodgeable arrows of light. Almost. Any pilot other than Lotor would have crashed and burned within seconds of being sighted and fired upon, but the shuttle didn’t have any other pilot at the controls.

It didn’t matter that the ship he flew was a small escape vessel with limited capabilities, Lotor had a natural feel for flight that let him make it look like it was the easiest thing in the universe. He wove and rolled through the hail of lasershot without taking a single hit.

Allura hated to admit it, but even now she was still impressed. She had only ever seen him in some kind of warship, his handling of a ship that certainly was not meant to be handled that way was almost miraculous.

Sincline danced around it as they dove, taking out the strikers that got too close. Allura knew her own flying was nothing to sniff at, and although Veronica and Romelle had a bit of learning to do when it came to controls they weren’t too shabby with weapons. Veronica especially, she shared her brother’s affinity for sharpshooting and hit almost everything she fired at even while moving at high speed.

Miles away, the sky was lit with explosions and fire as three Lions began their assault on the remaining Galra cruisers. Although Shiro had only had time to give them the bare basic information about Blue’s mission to reacquire her Paladin he had shared that it was most likely Adam who had gotten Honerva to send away half of the armada. Allura had never met this man, but she hoped all went well and that she got the chance to.

“Allura, we have a problem,” Shiro’s voice came over her comm, speak of the devil.

“We have a lot of problems,” Allura answered through grit teeth, rolling Sincline out of the way of a cruiser’s cannon fire. “We’re missing this week’s episode of _Talent Search_ and they stopped making my favorite style of shoes ten thousand years ago. But go ahead, pile something else on.”

“Honerva called our bluff.” There was a pause, and Allura heard him slam buttons and swear. Clearly he was just as busy over there in Blue. “She knew someone would run with her target so she sent an empty ship. She’s still here somewhere, and now she knows the Lions and Sincline are too.”

“When you said we had a problem I thought you meant something along the lines of a broken megathruster,” Allura lamented. “Not that our house burned down and our cat died. If you could work on only giving good news for a while, that would be lovely.”

“Please stop learning Earth speech from Matt,” Shiro grunted.

“I’m testing out being the edgy one in the group, Keith’s been too happy lately,” Allura quipped, throwing her decelerator on to avoid a formation of passing strikers. “All right, warning taken. I’m a bit busy here so I can’t chat. Be careful.”

Allura pulled Sincline back and shot upward, trying to draw as many strikers as she could away from Lotor’s shuttle. Those that were nearest started to follow, and she began flipping and weaving.

“How are you doing back there, Kuro?” She asked, glancing at him in the rear view as they looped around a cruiser, stopping up close so Romelle could take out its cannon.

“Nauseous bordering on terrified,” Kuro called back, sitting stiffly in the seat with his hands gripping the arm rests tightly. He raised one to give her a thumbs up and a pained smile. “You’re doing great, Sweetie.”

“Well I hope you’re ready to go from great to fantastic because our window of opportunity just got a lot smaller. Veronica, Romelle, you heard Shiro’s warning?”

“Yeah, and I don’t like it,” Veronica answered. “It’s bad enough Lance is down there against druids, we need to get him out of there before their boss shows up.”

“Honerva will be after the Lions and us next,” Romelle reminded them. “If she doesn’t think Kuro is on the Atlas she’s going to figure he’s in one of the other ships. Let’s get in and get out before she starts trying to open them up.”

“My sentiments exactly,” Allura agreed. “Hang on, ladies.”

She braced herself and nudged up her accelerator, going for speed instead of agility. She could feel the shaking as Sincline dove instead of ducked and began to take hits, but a little bit of damage was just the price they were going to have to pay. As the mech sped past Lotor’s shuttle she reached out and grabbed it, pulling it straight down and shielding it with Sincline’s body.

“Sorry!” She winced when she heard Maya and Keela screaming over the comms. “Change of plans, we’re in a bit more of a hurry!”

Sincline hugged the shuttle close and Allura did her best to twist and turn on the way down to keep it safe from stray lasers. She had almost broken through the lower atmosphere when a bunch of strikers honed in on her trajectory and pulled together in formation below her. They came up like a wall, firing in tandem and impossible to avoid.

Allura’s first instinct was to throw on the brakes and begin picking them off a few at a time to open up the way, but there wasn’t time for that now. There were two cruisers closing in behind her to try and sandwich her in between enemies. Her fingers twitched on the controls, instinctively wanting to come to a stop to avoid collision, but she knew if she did the cruisers would easily shoot them down.

“Floor it,” Kuro recommended. Allura glanced up at him in the rear view.

“What?”

“ _Floor it_.”

Kuro reached for the controls in front of him, and before Allura could do anything to lock him out he revved the accelerator up to its limit. Sincline shot forward faster, the wall of strikers rushing up toward them. She had only a few seconds to tense for impact but to her surprise it never came; the pilots of the smaller ships did the math and realized they were on the losing end, and at the last minute most of them moved out of the way.

Two or three didn’t. They fired on her right up to the last minute, seeming to believe they could destroy the mech before it hit them, only to end up blazing fireballs upon impact. Sincline broke through the lowest level of ships and down into open sky, and sped toward the colony.

“Don’t ever do that again!” Allura exclaimed, glaring at Kuro in the rear view. “Do not touch Opal’s controls! That was insane and irresponsible!”

“Oh, definitely,” Kuro agreed. He offered no defense.

Curtis had been right, she fumed. Kuro had no fear of things that hadn’t already hurt him, and that apparently included crashing a one-of-a-kind sentient mech through a phalanx of Galra strikers.

Some of them gave chase, following the Sincline downward, and she knew they couldn’t be allowed to reach the colony. Until they got word that the Galra ground soldiers were cleared the town’s particle barrier couldn’t be raised, luring in more strikers to fire down on allies was obviously not the best of ideas.

“Get ready for a rough landing!” She warned Lotor.

Without waiting for a response she dove straight down, turning up at the last minute to level out so close to the ground that she could hear the thumping of the occasional tall tree hitting the hull of the mech. As they neared the colony she threw on the decelerator.

The Sincline slowed dramatically, but before it could come to a complete stop Allura switched up and accelerated again. She used the brief window of non-lethal speed to plant the shuttle down in the trees below before continuing on.

The strikers followed the Sincline, unaware of the secret delivery, bypassing the colony as Allura sped across the tree-covered foothills. She arced upward in a loop, coming up behind her followers, and Veronica and Romelle shot down a handful of them before the others darted out of range.

“Time to break,” Allura told her teammates as she relinquished control of the other two ships’ movement. “Circle the colony, take out any strikers that decide to come down and be nosy. Keep low, okay? I don’t want you getting noticed by any of those cruisers.”

“Can do,” Veronica answered. “Be careful, let us know as soon as you have Lance.”

Sincline disengaged, and Jade and Carnelian fell away as Opal arced around to return back the way they’d come. Allura had an easier time staying low by the tree canopy with just her ship, and without the strikers on her tail she could better take note of the scenery. The town lay to her right, hidden down in the depression of the ancient lake, pinpointed by plumes of smoke that rose up into the sky to punctuate the fighting that was undoubtedly still happening on the ground.

Behind it the ground rose upward, a natural curved wall cupping the back of the colony. A waterfall ran down the rocky edifice, reflecting and refracting the light of a late afternoon that would all too soon begin to turn into twilight.

“Scan the area,” she ordered Kuro. “I’ll keep an eye out for any more strikers.”

“You told me to never touch the controls again,” Kuro reminded her.

“Well now I’m telling you to touch the controls.”

“You’re sending me very mixed signals here,” Kuro answered as he took over the scanners. “I don’t know if this relationship is going to work.”

“I’ll cry about it later,” Allura assured him, bringing Opal up to skim the trees on the incline heading up to the cliffs. “We’re looking for a human-Altean mixed signature, he’ll be followed by a group of druids.”

“Four druids.”

“I don’t know how many,” Allura admitted. “Keith didn’t say.”

“No, I’m telling you, it’s four druids,” Kuro said, superimposing the readings on the main viewscreen. “There, heading for the clearing at the clifftop.”

He zoomed in, a magnified view coming up in the corner of the screen. Allura picked out Lance’s outline immediately as Opal read his heat signature down in the trees, and the four bodies tracking him from a distance were quite a bit colder than their surrounding environment. Allura headed for the clearing itself, the only place she would be able to touch down. Opal came in for a smooth, easy landing at the far side of the clearing.

“Keep an eye on everything,” she requested, pulling off her harness and opening the canopy. “Stay inside.”

“Whoa, hold on, where do you think you’re going?” Kuro asked, sitting up straighter.

“To help Lance get here safely,” Allura answered, climbing out. She grabbed both of the guns she’d taken from Blue back while they’d still been in the bunker, draping the straps over her shoulder. “Stay in this ship, do you understand? Under no circumstances are you to set foot outside of it until I tell you to.”

“You’re really going to take all the weapons and leave me with nothing?” Kuro asked. “Here? On the ground?”

“You don’t need a weapon, because you’re not leaving this ship,” Allura answered. “I don’t care if Honerva herself shows up while Lance and I are out here, you’re going to stay safely tucked in your seat. Opal…keep him inside.”

The canopy closed seemingly of its own accord as she stepped away, against Kuro’s protests. She pulled up her wrist viewscreen and locked onto Lance’s location, running into the trees in search of Lance.

* * * * * * * * * *

Keith watched Sincline fly past about a mile south of the colony, saw Allura abruptly stop and start again. As the mech sped away with a number of strikers hot on its heels Keith could guess at what she’d been doing. So could Acxa, who was already hailing Lotor’s shuttle. It took a moment before the comms connected, and when they did Lotor’s image flickered onto the screen.

“Lorelia shuttle,” he answered in a monotone voice, his hair sticking up straight in the air. It took Keith a few seconds to realize that he was hanging upside down in his seat, and looking extremely put upon about it.

“Ow, ow,” one of the Altean women with him was screeching from somewhere to the side. “You’re hurting me!”

“Then cut your hair!” The other was yelling. “Why is your hair so long? Who needs hair down past their ass? Dammit, I can’t get it untangled from the hilt…”

“Is everything going okay out there?” Acxa asked awkwardly. The first woman shrieked again.

“Swimmingly,” Lotor answered blandly. “Prepare the particle barrier to go up as soon as I give the word. In the meantime, begin scanning the area. The Atlas has sent word that Honerva called their bluff and didn’t show up at the exchange. She’s probably nearby.”

“Exactly what we don’t need,” Keith groaned. “Those mechs of hers will be back in our airspace soon then. We need to get everyone out of those mines and safely inside under a barrier.”

“The barrier won’t hold up for long under those things once they are here,” Acxa warned. “Lotor, how quickly can you get here?”

“Shortly.” Lotor drew his sword as he spoke, drawing it across his harness. He dropped out of the seat and disappeared for an instant, but reappeared quickly to readjust the camera now that he was standing on the shuttle’s ceiling. “Give us about five doboshes.”

“Griffin,” Keith leaned over to the other computer. “Do you have eyes on where Sincline dropped that shuttle?”

“Affirmative.”

“Keep an eye on the area between there and here for the next five or six minutes,” Keith requested. “Lotor and two alchemists will be coming in on foot and may need cover fire.”

“Maya and Keela will be breaking off at the colony border,” Lotor added. “They’ll be heading for the mines to help heal any of the badly sick or injured and help streamline the evacuation. Acxa, raise the genesis platform. Princess Allura will be joining us to activate it once Lance is safely picked up.”

“I’m above the drop point,” James informed them. “I have visual on the shuttle through the canopy…you’re good to go.”

“We’ll be there momentarily.”

Lotor ended the transmission abruptly. Acxa looked over at Hira, who was standing off to the side watching the battle progress on another viewscreen, coordinating efforts through a headset she wore.

“How are we looking?” She asked.

“Three-quarters of the town is clear,” Hira announced. “The remaining Galra ground forces are up in the market quarter and out around the edges. Now it’s just a matter of keeping them from evacuating to their own ships and joining the fight in the sky.”

“Divert some of your people to the ships,” Acxa advised. “Blow their crystals so they can’t get airborne. Can you handle things up here?”

Hira nodded, even as she began speaking again to someone who was relaying information to her over the headset.

“Keith, how’s your arm?”

Keith flexed his shoulder, gritting his teeth at the pain that ran down through his arm. Even the tiniest movements sent pain radiating out from his elbow, but he didn’t have time to be gentle with it.

“It’s fine.”

“You’re horrible at lying when you’re hurt,” Acxa advised, tossing him a gun. “Luckily, most of the colony is cleared and you shouldn’t have to fight. Come on, we have to prep the platform for Allura.”

They skipped the elevator, in this small of a building it really was faster to run down the stairs. As they threw open the double doors of the command center building and spilled out onto the bridge Keith caught sight of two of Hira’s guards on the far side of the lake pulling those creatures out of the water with what looked like glowing whips.

“What are they doing?”

Acxa glanced over as they ran, veering off from him as they reached the far side of the bridge. There was an open area here, a circle on the ground surrounded by steps forming a sort of promenade. There were what Keith assumed to be low decorative pillars at points around the area’s edge.

“They’re sedating and restraining them, so they can’t get out of the lake and hurt anyone,” she answered, stopping at one of the pillars. She pressed a hidden button on the side and the top opened to reveal a control panel.

“Why don’t they just shoot them?”

“Modern Alteans don’t believe in causing harm unless necessary. That’s why this planet was cultivated with no animals in the first place. We don’t eat meat or use animal byproducts, they weren’t needed.”

It was the middle of a fight for their lives, Keith didn’t really think the lives of a couple weird water predators were really that high up on the list of importance. But then, modern Alteans were clearly very different from those of Allura’s time, and worlds apart from the Galra.

“And what is this genesis platform Lotor was talking about?” Keith pulled his attention away from the lake to what Acxa was doing.

“The terraforming device Lotor was talking about was never actually used on this planet,” Acxa answered, beginning to enter in codes Keith presumed Lotor had sent her while the shuttle had been up in orbit. “A lot of how it works has been lost to time, Honerva’s probably the only one alive who still knows how to use it in a way that will actually make a planet habitable. What little we do know comes from an old library on Naxzela that Lotor raided before the Galra destroyed it to build their base. He built one here to hide it so the technology wouldn’t be completely lost, then thousands of years later he used it as a guide to build the one on Colony Two.”

There was a soft hiss and the pillars started to slowly sink down into the ground. The metallic circle outline that Keith had thought was simply inlaid decoration turned out to be the edge of a platform that began to rise with them on it.

“The genesis platform is the part of the device that shows on the surface. It’s where the tech is operated from, and where the quintessence is loaded to be forced into the planet. We assume Alteans used to use the platform as a group, that extremely gifted alchemists would manipulate quintessence right out of the quintessence field and into the device. But with no training and no clear instructions for how it was used, we can’t do much. We can force quintessence into the planet’s core, but nobody knows how to make the device actually use it bring life to a dead planet. Or we can pull the quintessence out of the planet and use it to destroy the Galra fleet. Either way, it’s done from this platform.”

They only rose a few feet then stopped. Controls had risen up that were similar to the ones Keith had seen Allura use to operate the Castle of Lions, and holographic viewscreens were beginning to flicker on in front of them.

The technology wasn’t completely alien. Keith recognized some of it from the Castle, at least in shape if not in solid form. He reached out to touch one of the viewscreens and it reacted, bringing up a familiar start menu. It was all in Altean, he didn’t actually know what any of the words meant but he remembered the shapes of some letters.

“This thing goes all the way down to the core of the planet?” He asked, booting up the scanning feature. “This looks like…it has probes all over the surface?”

“I assume to give the operator an idea of whether or not the device is working as intended,” Acxa answered from where she was working on another screen. “I think we can use them to look for Honerva if we check their readings for disruptions in the planet’s quintessence.”

“If she’s not using it, will it still pick her up? Or will we have to wait until she actively does magic before the sensors go off?”

“I don’t know,” Acxa shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve never actually seen one of these things in action before. I guess we’ll find out.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Lotor ran through the thick foliage with a familiarity that rivaled any of the colony’s natives. For a little more than nine thousand years he’d been this planet’s patron, he knew its local forests down to some of the smallest details.

He didn’t have to slow down to change course when he heard a striker go down ahead, or stop to look for ways to cross ravines and ditches. His knowledge of the area let him move like a ghost, unhindered by detritus or undergrowth, and leave behind no sign that they were there.

Maya and Keela followed behind in single file, their footfalls matching his almost exactly. They had been out in the barren wilds of Colony Two’s planet for years, a place where speed was often of the essence if one wanted to survive, they were well-trained in how to follow a leader at high speed as long as he laid out a proper path.

He heard the fighting before he saw it and already knew what he would find when they broke out of the tree line. He wasn’t surprised, then, when they spilled out into the middle of a fight.

The colony guard was outnumbered and clearly not in the best of health, but their own familiarity with the area was giving them an advantage. The Galra, many of whom had likely assumed serving Haggar here would be a simple way to earn glory by helping wipe out a secret Altean outpost, also didn’t appear to have been prepared for any kind of uprising.

Lotor pulled out his knife and dived immediately into the fray, drawing the blade across the throat of the nearest Galra soldier from behind. As she went down he moved on to the next, unsheathing his sword and slamming it through the side of another who was facing off against a tiring Altean soldier. He remained on his path toward the inner area of the town but continued to cut down enemies as he went, leaving a trail of the bleeding and the dead in his wake.

Once, he would have felt something to be killing his own kind so indiscriminately. But not anymore, these people were the worst of the Galra, the kind of people who had spent ten thousand years telling him that even a drop of non-Galra blood made him inferior. They were here to commit genocide against those he sought to protect, had consciously made the decision to come to this planet and commit atrocities toward innocent victims.

His only regret was that he couldn’t kill them twice.

They reached the town’s edge, and Maya and Keela split off to make a run for the mines. Overhead there were a few strikers finally starting to make their way down from the battle waging up in the skies, making the trip treacherous, but the didn’t hesitate. Fear was something they had long since cast out just to survive.

The fighting thinned as he broke through the line, moving into a town that had once been peaceful and beautiful. Now anything that could burn did, a tactic the Galra used in retreat to distract enemy troops and aid their escape. It wasn’t helping them now, the fires simply burned unchecked as Lotor ran through the empty streets to the main road.

Aside from an occasional guard who was simply too hurt to carry on, the town was empty. Lotor dodged crumbling buildings and jumped fallen rubble without slowing, only coming to a stop when he finally reached the promenade before the bridge to the command building. Acxa already had the genesis platform starting up, and he had to jump up onto it as he approached.

“Any signs of her?” He panted, striding across the platform to one of the open consoles.

The red Paladin was here, though last time Lotor had seen him Keith hadn’t really been a Paladin. He’d still been off with the Blade of Marmora, apparently traipsing through the Quantum Abyss and kidnapping one of Acxa’s mentally delicate patients. He looked quite different now, his sclera taken on the yellow color of the Galra and vivid purple stripes showing on his skin. The hair at the back of his neck was a deep magenta color as well, similar to the woman he’d brought back.

“Been dipping into quintessence a bit?” Lotor asked as he logged into the viewscreen. There was no way the boy’s features would have shifted so much of their own accord. “You might want to quit that while you’re ahead.”

“You’re not exactly one to talk.”

“I’m the perfect person to talk. Acxa,” Lotor started a system scan, checking for any program errors and any points in the terraformer that were in disrepair. “Call up to Hira, tell her to get a target lock. Input the coordinates for those grounded Galra ships.”

“What do you think you’re going to do?” Acxa asked. “You shouldn’t be touching that thing, leave it until Allura arrives.”

“Until Allura arrives I’m the only one here who can use it,” Lotor answered. “With Honerva here on the ground somewhere unnecessary risks have now become necessary ones.”

He already knew this was going to mess with his head. If he was lucky it would just leave him very tired and irritable, which shouldn’t make him too much of an issue to deal with. Then again, he had thought the same thing several years ago when he’d taken one of the Sincline ships for its maiden trip through the quintessence field, and look how that had turned out.

“Here.” He pulled the small cases holding the hormone therapy out of the thigh pocket on his armor and tossed them over to her. “I’ve already taken the dopamine blocker, handling the weapons systems shouldn’t trigger anything. In case it does, have a dose of the quintessence blocker ready.”

She caught them with ease and opened them up to check the contents, then hopped down off the platform and headed back toward the building to find a syringe. Lotor stepped up to the control pads and rested his hands on the smooth metal surface, taking a deep breath.

Lotor knew he was never going to be an alchemist. He had the potential and he was gifted, he could manipulate quintessence as well as any of the others. But in his hands alchemy became more like the dark magic Honerva used, it did not give life or bring light. He had thought that it was just a matter of nurture, but his trip to Oriande had made it clear it was simply his nature.

Alchemy as the Alteans knew it was not his element. It wasn’t something he could learn because it wasn’t within his capabilities. His was Honerva’s magic, the magic of her druids. It was dark and drained life rather than giving it,

But he had magic. Exactly the type that was useful here.

Readings began flashing across the viewscreen in front of him as his sensors moved to the coordinates Hira sent down. Lotor adjusted the scanners, locking them onto the energy signature of the corrupted balmera crystals that powered the grounded ships of the Galra occupiers.

He closed his eyes and reached out, the terraformer expanding his range and allowing him to feel the power flowing through the balmera crystals. They were battleship class, very powerful, and perfect for what he needed. Below the ground, the terraformer’s sub-surface probes sprang to life at his command, siphoning power from the ships.

The terraformer had been built and hidden here not just to save the technology for a day when it might be used, but to double as a planetary defense mechanism. He had known, thousands of years ago, that the day might come when he would have to defend his people from bloodthirsty Galra ethnocentrists. For that purpose, the terraformer schematics had been slightly altered.

Lotor sapped the ships’ power supplies down into the terraformer’s core, and concentrated on activating the anti-air defenses.

* * * * * * * * * *

Keith felt the energy on the air. It whipped up around him, invisible to the eye but making the hair on his arms and neck stand up. He had been near Allura when she’d worked magic and felt the flow of it on the air, but it didn’t feel like this. This was different, it felt darker, more like the magic Macidus and Haggar had used than normal Altean alchemy. It didn’t particularly bother him, but it wasn’t what he was used to.

They platform they stood on started to glow, veins of purple light running through it as it began to power up. Keith felt a faint tremor running through the ground as he saw a pillar beginning to rise in the distance, a few miles south of the colony. He hadn’t been on Naxzela, but it looked similar to the ones his friends had described.

Up above, more cruisers were steadily appearing. Now that they didn’t have the numbers necessary to destroy the planet they were all beginning to gather where the fighting was going on.

“If they get low enough to realize there’s fighting going on here on the ground too, we’re done for,” Keith said.

“They do present a slight problem,” Lotor answered without opening his eyes. “I wish I’d noticed that.”

Keith had never been flicked in the face by sarcasm that toneless before. He wondered if he would set their progress back too far if he kicked Lotor in the shin.

The pillar started to spark, purple light running up through it in veins that matched the platform. There was a span of a few seconds when nothing happened, then the sky started to darken.

The particle barrier flickered on in small patches, the ages-old technology coming to life slowly. The darkening blue of late afternoon became a purple tinted layer of defense, cutting the upper and lower atmospheres in half and locking out half of the cruisers. The Lions remained on the inside of the barrier, he could see them in the distance still fighting with the ships that had come down low enough to be on the inside.

“Does this thing cover the whole planet?” Keith asked, staring up at it in surprise. It all seemed to work exactly like on Naxzela but with very different effect.

“No,” Lotor answered, eyes still closed. “It can…unfortunately, I have the power but not the skill. The cruisers will still be able to go around to the edges to drop down to the ground, but hopefully its reach is far enough that they won’t realize that for a while.”

Lotor’s hands were still resting on the power controls and he was frowning as if trying to concentrate. Keith realized he was going to have to actively work to keep the barrier up, he wasn’t going to be able to move away from the platform. He was stuck there until Allura got here or until the mines were evacuated and the Altean people were safely within the colony borders where the smaller barrier could be put up.

“Griffin, how are we looking?” Keith asked, stepping away from the controls so he didn’t have any interference with his comms.

“Like a dream,” James answered. “Veronica and Romelle are with us, nothing’s even getting close as long as we’re here. The colony guards just started bringing people out, they’re in bad shape and moving pretty slow but it looks like you should see the first arrivals in about two minutes. The mine entrance isn’t too far from the colony.”

“Okay,” Keith veered off, moving to jump down off the platform and step toward the edge of the promenade. At first he’d thought it was a trick of the lake surface reflecting the purple light, but now he was sure; the water level was falling. “Keep me posted.”

He stepped forward to the very edge, looking downward, and could see the man-made edges of the basin beginning to come into view. Something tickled his cheek, and when he turned his head upward he found a fine mist in the air beginning to turn into a heavier shower. The walls surrounding the colony were spraying water from points hidden within the texture of the rock.

A fire suppressant system, likely activated by Hira and Acxa back in the command center. It turned into a heavy rain, and as he watched the water from the far end of the colony ran back down toward the lake in narrow channels built into the ground for that purpose.

“The first basement is clear,” Keith was startled out of his curiosity as Acxa came up behind him, four guards along with her that continued on past Lotor without her. “We have full control of that system again, refugees from the mine can be steered down there while the fighting’s still going on.

“The second basement’s system needs an alchemist to open. That’s probably where any remaining children are, we can’t get in there until this is all over.”

“James said there are people coming out of the mines, at this point they’ll begin arriving at the town entrance any time now,” Keith told her. “We need to set up a way to get them herded in the right direction.”

“Hira’s already on it,” Acxa answered, looking up at the particle barrier covering the sky.

There were muted explosions on the other side as cruisers that were locked out tried to get through, and bright fireballs of light on the inside where the Lions were doing their best to take down as many in the low atmosphere as they could. Even from here Keith could see they were sticking together well, covering each other and making a very intimidating force to go up against.

But others were still arriving. Those that had come from the other side of the planet weren’t locked out, and were simply coming in under the edges of the barrier. Soon enough, they would communicate to the ones here that the way was open, and all the ships would once again be their problem.

Keith that pulled his attention away from the ships and the shield. Something that tickled the back of his mind, a familiar presence seeming to slowly wake and stretch and prepare to spread its wings.

Camille had gotten the hangar open, and Black was ready to fly.

Acxa was already going back to Lotor’s side to see if there was anything she could do. Keith stayed back by the edge of the water, closing his eyes and reaching out. In an instant he was no longer standing on two legs in the colony, he was on four moving to the opening. He was taking off, rising up through the open doors, out of the darkness of the bunker and into the open under a purple-tinted sky.

Keith did a sweep of the area, making note of the handful of cruisers scattered around in his view as they headed for the colony. They were definitely in trouble if they didn’t get Allura on that platform soon.

In the distance there was a flash of light, like a shooting star coming down over the sea. It came down past the edge of the particle barrier, all the way out near the horizon, and before it hit the water it pulled up and headed in his direction. It moved with formidable speed, causing an explosion of fireworks as it tore clear through one cruiser as it moved in over land.

The Red Lion.

She paid no mind to Black, flying past him without slowing down. Keith turned Black to follow her, bringing both Lions speeding toward the colony and hoping Red would help him use Black to finally get eyes on Lance.

* * * * * * * * * *

The underbrush was what really slowed him down, every time he got a decent burst of speed his foot caught on something else he didn’t see. Lance had almost eaten dirt three times already, it was only by dumb luck that he hadn’t fallen into a ditch and died before the druids could kill him.

To be honest, he was surprised they hadn’t caught him yet. He knew they could teleport, between the four of them they should have easily surrounded him. But for some reason they didn’t seem to be able to sense where he was.

Lance wondered if it was the entity he assumed he was carrying that threw them off. At least that would be one small perk to having some weird evil parasite hanging out and leeching off his life force.

He didn’t know why the one he carried made the others angry, he just knew that they had come after him back in the med bay and they had not been welcoming. It was also possible it wasn’t the entity he carried that they were mad about, but the fact that he was carrying it and he wasn’t under their control. Either way, they wanted to get their hands on him and he knew it wasn’t for anything nice.

He stopped and hid behind a tree, pressing his back up against it and taking a moment to catch his breath. Up overhead, the sky suddenly darkened as a particle barrier went up, tinting the whole area with purple light. Lance didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, since it didn’t have the usual soft blue glow that accompanied Allura’s or Camille’s magic.

He heard something moving up ahead and froze, trying not to make a sound. It seemed the druids had finally gotten wise to him and started to surround him, and his rest had let at least one get ahead of him.

“Dammit,” he muttered, carefully pushing away from the tree and creeping forward to duck behind another.

He had a sword he’d taken from fallen Galra soldiers as he’d passed, so thankfully he wasn’t completely unarmed. Not that it had done its previous owner any good, obviously.

He flattened himself against another tree and waited, holding the sword at the ready and hoping he would be able to use the one-handed blade at least half as decently as he used a two-handed one. He had never trained with a smaller sword, only his bayard and the Altean broadsword it produced. As he held his breath and listened to the druid coming closer, he swore to himself that if he survived this he was going to train with different kinds of swords.

The footfalls came closer. Just as they were about to pass he stepped out, swinging the blade around to try and hit his opponent’s neck.

The druid reacted quickly, ducking under the blade and grabbing his wrist. She dipped under his arm, spinning around and twisting it back behind his back, forcing him to drop the blade and kicking the back of his knee to make him fall. She was just about to punch him in the face to knock him out completely when she stopped, realizing who she was in the process of beating to a pulp.

“Allura!” Lance exclaimed, hugging her legs as she let him go and straightened up. “Oh god, I’ve never been so happy to be threatened before!”

“You could have killed me!” Allura complained, knocking him lightly on the top of his head. “Come on, up. Are those druids nearby?”

“They’re behind me, but I’m not sure where,” Lance answered, letting her pull him up to his feet. “It doesn’t seem like they can track me very well.”

“How are you?” Allura asked, looking him over worriedly. “Keith said you might have one of those things in you. They showed us that little girl.”

“I’m fine, as far as I can tell,” Lance answered, rubbing the back of his neck. “I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel like anything’s in my head or taking me over. I’d still like to get it out soon, though.”

“Come here.”

Allura reached up and rested her hands on his temples, closing her eyes. He closed his own against the glow, feeling a gentle warmth on his face and the faint coolness of quintessence running through him. He knew what she was doing just by the sensation, that she was searching for an extra presence.

“There’s definitely something there,” she said finally, letting her hands fall away and opening her eyes. “I can sense that much. But it’s hiding itself, it has up a wall I can’t get past.”

“It isn’t giving off “I want to eat my host” vibes by any chance, is it?”

“It’s not giving off any vibes at all, but that could be just as bad,” Allura admitted. “We have to get this colony safely locked down and then get you back to the Atlas. The sooner I can get that thing out of you the better. I’m taking this sword before you maim yourself.”

Lance gave a half-hearted protest as she took the blade. Instead she shrugged off one of the two guns she had slung over her shoulder, passing it over to him. It was one of the high powered ones from the Paladin armory, which made him feel a little bit better.

“My ship is up at the cliff top.”

Allura motioned for him to follow and started jogging back the way she’d come, carefully weaving her way through the trees. There were some spots they passed with broken twigs from her tripping earlier and even an area of crushed underbrush where it looked like she had fallen of some point. He felt a little less insecure about his inability to keep his feet while moving quickly.

“Almost there!” She called back after a few minutes. “I should warn you, we have a bit of company. A…friend of Lotor’s, he accompanied them back. I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Uh oh, why?” Lance asked warily. “Is it his nanny?”

“Governess.”

“That’s just what rich people call nannies,” Lance grumbled. “Is it her?”

“No,” Allura said carefully as the trees thinned and the ground leveled off. “But you’re probably going to wish it was. Just try to keep an open mind, for Shiro’s sake.”

Lance was about to ask her what that meant when she stopped suddenly. He slammed into her back, making her stumble forward a few steps, and grabbed her by the back of her armor collar to keep her from falling down. As he did he saw past her, to the form standing in the middle of the clearing.

Honerva.

She was between them and Allura’s Sincline ship, looking at the vessel from a distance. Allura spun around and slapped a hand over Lance’s mouth to keep him quiet, and he instinctively did the same to her. The two of them attempted to move back into the trees without making any noise, a feat that proved very difficult when they had barely been able to stay upright when they weren’t entangled. Still, Lance was starting to think they had a chance to disappear and hide when Honerva turned her head slightly, glancing back in their direction.

Lance and Allura froze, knowing they were caught as she raised a hand and snapped her fingers. There was a lull of only a few seconds before the druids she called from the woods began to appear, lining up behind them to block their escape.

“I hate to see you leaving when you’ve only just arrived,” Honerva said coolly, turning away from the ship to face them.

Lance almost choked when he saw the state of her. There was dried blood all over face and clothes, and the softer, fabric area of her armor had been ripped away around her abdomen. Not cut but torn, shreds of cloth moving faintly in the light wind, so saturated with blood the armor looked like it was still wet in places.

“Be careful,” Allura murmured to him, keeping her eyes on Honerva. “Shiro told us they ran into her while going to pick up your friend Adam, none of their weapons could bring her down.”

“Color me completely unsurprised,” Lance answered softly, looking back over his shoulder at the druids. They were all staring at him, but the weren’t moving yet. “Also extremely nervous.”

Allura unshouldered her other gun and handed it over to him to give herself a full range of movement, brandishing the sword she had and keeping her eyes on Honerva. Although it made his skin crawl to do it, Lance turned so they were back to back and leveled his gun at the druids, looking from one to the next.

“I wonder if you guys are laserproof too,” he commented. “The second any one of you moves, we find out.”

He heard Allura suck in a breath and glanced back to see that Honerva was walking slowly toward them.

“The Black Paladin is piloting the Blue Lion still, I presume?” She asked. “Where is the copy? They won’t be together. Which of you protects him?

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Allura answered, falling into a fighting stance. “I have a new ship to worry about, I can’t be expected to know what’s going on in the Lions anymore.”

“I know how the Champion thinks, I’ve seen his strategies and methods,” Honerva answered. “I’ve been inside his head. He sent the weaker one to hide while his arrogant stand-in pretended to meet for an exchange. You can either tell me who has him or I can begin tearing open ships until I find one of them. And I’ll start with your two inexperienced friends in the other Sincline ships.”

“It was a well-known secret back on Altea that everyone always liked your sister better than you,” Allura answered, her voice edged in a sarcastic sweetness. “I’m beginning to understand why. Your personality is as third-rate as your alchemy.”

“Allura, manners!” Lance called with mock horror. “It’s true, but you shouldn’t say it out loud.”

Honerva narrowed her eyes, her voice coming out as an angry hiss. She did not like that one little bit.

“You’re an impudent little brat,” her anger was palpable, making the air feel heavy and thick. “You think you’re untouchable just because you made one short trip to Oriande? If I wanted to I could tear you both in half. ”

“It’s cute that you think you could even get close,” Allura said boldly. She shifted ever so slightly, and Lance felt her poke him lightly in the back with her elbow. H tensed, preparing to move. “I’d love to see you try.”

Lance’s hands tightened on the gun, and his gaze swept the druids. Behind him he heard Allura move and could only assume Honerva was approaching. He didn’t dare take his eyes off his own targets, throwing himself to the side and rolling up onto his knee to level his weapon at them and begin to fire.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kuro sat on the floor of Opal’s cockpit, his back up against the back of his seat as he tried to make himself as small as possible. His life had been a waking nightmare ever since humans had started traipsing into it, and it was steadily getting worse instead of better.

“This is because she said it out loud,” he whispered to himself, eyes squeezed shut and hands over his ears. “She just had to jinx it.”

He knew logically that the woman standing in the middle of the clearing looking the ship over couldn’t actually see him. His visual was an electronic screen, not a window, and there was no way for her to know that anybody was still sitting in this cockpit. She didn’t seem to be able to sense him here either, even though he felt her presence like a suffocating wave.

He had scurried back behind his seat as soon as he’d seen her appear, as if not being able to see her somehow made him more safe. But he was trapped in a ship with locked down controls and no weapon, twenty yards from a person who would lock him back in a cage again if she caught him. There was nowhere safe for him on this whole planet.

“I hate to see you leaving when you’ve only just arrived.”

Honerva’s voice drifted over the speakers, making Kuro tense up so tightly he felt a muscle in the back of his neck start to protest. He slowly leaned to the side, just barely peeking around the chair to try and see what was going on outside. To his further horror, Allura was across the clearing, pinned in between Honerva and what looked like four Alteans with a boy in matching blue armor.

“Oh, come on, no,” he whimpered into the chair. “They’re just a couple of kids, leave them alone.”

They were soldiers of course, but that didn’t make it any better. Honerva was a solid ten thousand years old and a fully grown adult, with all the backing an empire had to offer. Trained or not, these two were in their early twenties at the most. Even if they could match her for firepower she had an advantage of experience.

“Oh no, don’t. Don’t provoke her,” Kuro groaned as Allura started mouthing off. “Nope, there she goes. Oh, that girl is so grounded if she lives through this.”

He moved slowly back into his seat, trying to access the control panel. Nothing would respond except to give him an error telling him all commands were locked. He had only known Lotor’s passcode for the cruiser because it was the same for everything, and he’d been given it for the computers at the facility. He definitely didn’t know Allura well enough to even begin guessing at what hers could be.

He kept trying, glancing up when he heard laserfire. Allura and Honerva were going at it with swords, because that was real goddamn safe, and the boy Kuro assumed to be Lance was darting around the edge of the clearing to use the treeline as cover as he fired off shots at the Alteans.

Allura blocked a swing from Honerva’s blade, and there was a flash of blue light. Honerva flew backwards, rolling hard across the ground but maneuvering so she came up on her feet and tirelessly charged again.

“Oh right…she’s an alchemist,” Kuro realized, remembering the image of her trying to heal Curtis in his Abyss vision. He looked around at the inside of Opal’s cockpit. “Did you know that?”

There was no response, obviously.

“Of course you did,” Kuro answered his own question, going back to the console. He tried a few more code combinations and continued to get the same error, growing steadily more frustrated. “Come on, work with me here! I’m trying to save your pilot! I’m not trying to steal you, Galra strikers are more my style.”

It was no use. Allura had the controls sealed tight, nothing he did would activate them. A bit closer now because he had been running, Lance took a direct hit and rolled across the ground. Unlike Honerva, he wasn’t able to shield against it and was slower to get up. It was one person against four of what Kuro now identified as druids, and it was not a fair fight.

Kuro sank down desolately in his chair, knowing he was going to have to go out there. If he didn’t, and anything happened to either of those kids while he sat here and watched, he would never forgive himself. Especially knowing that he was the one Honerva really wanted.

Still, he hesitated. He kept hoping that by some miracle Honerva would decide the fight was over and go, or that something would happen that would give Allura and Lance the upper hand. But it didn’t, and as the seconds continued to tick by the odds only got worse.

He cursed under his breath and pushed out of the chair, going to the cockpit door and hitting the control to open it. He couldn’t risk opening the canopy, that would call everyone’s attention, but the door exit was at the back and he might be able to keep some of the element of surprise.

Nothing happened, and he irritably hit the control again. Nothing.

“Okay, you can’t actually keep me locked in here,” he complained to the ship, now repeatedly mashing the button as if he were in an elevator trying to get it to move faster. “Open this door right now or I start destroying things. You think I won’t put my fist through your control panels? Because I will.”

The door controls remained unresponsive. Behind him, Kuro heard a groan of pain as Lance was hit again. He didn’t dare look back to check on Allura, if he laid eyes on Honerva he might lose his nerve.

Kuro braced himself and slammed his fist into the wall over the door panel, denting the metal inward. It was the smallest amount of damage he could really do while still proving his point.

“Next is your control consoles,” he warned. “Then I rip off the door.”

Two seconds of silence ticked by, and then the door unlocked. Kuro felt apprehensive instead of relieved, wishing just a little that the ship hadn’t given in, that he had some excuse to stay in here where it was at least a little bit safer. He kept his foot blocking the inner airlock door from closing and pushed open the outer, just to be sure the ship wasn’t going to trap him in between, and quietly stepped out.

“If she yells about me leaving, we’ll tell her it was all my fault,” Kuro whispered, patting the door frame reassuringly.

He dropped down to the ground and crept along the side, hidden for the moment by the ship’s hull. Kuro had just about reached the front of the craft to sneak a look at what was going on when he heard a grunt and saw Lance go skidding across the grass in front of him.

As Lance pushed himself shakily up onto all fours and glared in the direction of the druids, Kuro got a good look at his face. This was definitely the unmarked Altean boy who had been trying to treat him in his vision, but unlike Allura he wasn’t using his alchemy to defend himself.

It was a dumb move and Kuro didn’t know why anyone would go that route. The druids were all using magic against him, and even though Lance appeared to have some level of natural defense against it he was still being worn down. He was bruised and his nose was bleeding, and he had a split lip from hitting the ground. And armor or not he didn’t have a helmet like Allura did, and his slightly glazed eyes made it clear he’d had a couple knocks on the head so far.

Kuro flattened himself against Opal, waving his arms wildly to silently get Lance’s attention. The motion caught the young man’s attention and he frowned, squinting a little and obviously confused.

“Sven?”

“No!” Kuro hissed, trying not to be heard by anybody else. He motioned again, trying to get Lance to understand without yelling. “Toss one of your guns over here!”

Lance hesitated. Kuro saw his gaze flick over him from top to bottom, and he clearly came to the conclusion that everyone else quickly had; that he was looking at one of Shiro’s clones. For a moment Kuro thought he was going to assume he was working for Honerva like everyone suspected, but the dire situation held too much weight.

Lance pushed himself up to his feet and aimed his gun at the druids, but didn’t fire. He pretended it was jammed and threw it to the side, where it skidded across the ground and into Kuro’s reach. Kuro grabbed it and waved Lance over, gripping the weapon tightly with both hands as the Paladin sprinted to the dubious safety of behind Allura’s ship.

The gun wouldn’t work on a druid, Kuro knew that much. As he and Curtis had seen in the cruiser, these things were animating bodies that were already dead so health obviously wasn’t an issue. What he had to do was dismantle their vehicles, even though it made him nauseous just to think about it.

He did not like causing serious harm, even when it was completely necessary.

Lance darted past him and Kuro waited, stepping out and swinging the gun like a bat as soon as he saw the shadow of one of the approaching druids. The metal connected solidly with the side of her head, but the body in front of him was Altean and had more strength than most species. The blow made her stumble to the side but it didn’t incapacitate; if anything it just made her angry.

Kuro swung the gun back around and hit her again from the other side, coming back around with a roundhouse kick that threw her off kilter enough to put her on the ground. In his follow-through he came around to grab the second druid to arrive by the shoulders, using him as a brace for his weight to bring both feet up and kick past him into the face of the third, who was coming right behind.

Three stumbled back as Kuro landed, facing two’s back. He grimaced and reached up, gripping the second druid’s head firmly in both hands and giving it a hard twist.

The sound and the feeling of the breaking neck made him shudder.

 _He was already dead_ , Kuro reminded himself. _You can’t hurt someone who’s already dead_.

In fact, Kuro highly suspected that the broken neck would only keep the druid down temporarily. Back on the plateau, any injury they had caused Honerva had closed up fairly quickly, there was no reason to suspect her druids would be any different.

Kuro leaned down to scoop up the gun, rolling forward over two’s body and coming up on his feet right in front of the first druid. He put the gun under her chin and pulled the trigger, turning his own head away so he wouldn’t have to see the damage done. The third druid was getting to her feet, and the fourth had now come around the side of the ship.

They were at a distance now, and he couldn’t get close enough fast enough to incapacitate them just yet. Instead he grabbed Lance’s wrist and hauled him along with him as he ran, moving around the front of the ship. He was tempted to duck inside and try to hide, but there was no telling if the druids could teleport in there or if it was protected somehow. If they could, Kuro didn’t want to trap himself there.

“Who _are_ you?” Lance asked, stumbling along behind him as he was pulled.

“Tired,” Kuro answered. “Stressed. Moderately traumatized. Gone enough to answer to anything except Sven at this point.”

There was a flash of purple light in front of him as they came around to the other side of Opal, and Kuro skidded to a stop as the fourth druid appeared. They turned to go the other way but the third was there, blocking them in on two sides with the ship being the third. To the other side, about five yards away, was the cliff edge. They were trapped.

He felt a searing pain as he was hit square in the back with a bolt of corrupted quintessence, a familiar sensation he’d felt before when being disciplined by Honerva. As much as it hurt physically it was the association that was worse, the memory of being punished for daring to not act as his owner wished.

It would have been very easy to curl up and give in, to quickly surrender in the hopes of staving off worse. There was a part of his brain that was conditioned, that told him he was already caught and that if he just started behaving he might be granted some leniency. And if he were alone, Kuro probably would have folded like a house of cards in a heavy breeze.

But he wasn’t alone. He was breathless, the wind partially knocked out of him from the way he’d hit the ground, but not out of the game yet. Behind him, he heard Lance let out a cry of pain as he was hit as well, but it didn’t sound as if the kid was too badly hurt yet.

Kuro stayed down, curling up as if in pain. He didn’t have to pretend, when those shots hit right they left an ache that sometimes didn’t dissipate for days. He did have to force himself not to lash out when he felt a hand grip the back of his armor, lifting him a bit to drag him across the ground.

He cracked open his eyes to look over at Lance, who wasn’t fighting either. He was slightly dazed, the knocks to the head he’d taken making him slower to recover from the hit. They were being dragged face-down back around the ship, out into the clearing. Out in the open wasn’t exactly where they wanted to be, but it was better than caged in a corner.

Kuro heard Allura call Lance’s name, then his own in surprise, and knew she’d been distracted. Her voice made Lance start to stir, and Kuro knew he didn’t have long before he started kicking up a fuss and put their captors on the defensive.

He stiffened and dug the fingers of both hands into the dirt for leverage, pulling himself free from the druid’s hold and kicking up into a handstand. One heel slammed into the back of her head, bringing her to a stop, and he hooked his heels on her shoulders. Kuro pulled himself into an upside-down sit-up, effectively folding himself in half to reach up and grab her head with both hands. Another twist, another broken neck, and they both fell to the ground.

Even as he got to his feet, he could see the first two coming to join them from where their bodies had been left. The first had some blood on her face from the gun injury, but aside from that they were both fine. There really was no keeping them down for any real length of time.

Lance was learning though, Kuro had been too distracted to see but he was currently pushing himself up off the ground from where he’d fallen next to the third druid, whose neck was bent at an odd angle as well. So two were temporarily down.

The first two druids were also learning. One moment they were slowly walking toward them, the next one had disappeared and reappeared behind Kuro. He felt a fist slam into his kidney, just under the area protected by his armor, and then he was kicked from behind and forced down to his knees. A hand grabbed him by the hair and he saw the other pull the knife Kuro had pick-pocketed from a soldier on the way down to the Lion hanger from where it was tucked in his greave, out of sight of Curtis and Allura when they’d been asking about weapons.

Kuro felt the knife blade slam into his side and waited for the agonizing pain, but it didn’t come. It definitely hurt, but it felt more like a deep cut than a debilitating wound. He was probably just in shock, but Kuro took advantage of the delayed pain response to fight back, grabbing the druid’s wrist and forcing the knife back out, trying to wrestle the blood-stained blade out of her hand.

“Stay down already, you mongrel bitch,” she snarled, angry that he wouldn’t give in. Kuro kept fighting, until she sent another wave of quintessence through him that made his muscles lock up and made the knife fall out of his hand.

Allura was still behind them and out of view, but he could hear the sounds of her still holding her own against Honerva. Lance had been forced to sprint away and do a slide across the grass to avoid the other druid’s magic, and was now precariously close to the cliff edge. Everything started to flicker then, drawing everyone’s attention upward.

The barrier that was keeping many of the cruisers out was beginning to give away. Straight up over the colony, one of Honerva’s mechs was draining the energy from the shield to bring it down.

“It’s over,” the second druid said to Lance looking back down at him. “The shield is coming down. Your warship will already have been destroyed by our Empress’ trap by now. Anybody left alive on this planet will soon be collected and properly confined. I suggest you come along peacefully and save yourself some pain.”

Lance was limping slightly as he took a few more steps back, stopping just short of the cliff edge. Kuro’s gun had been taken back when he’d first gotten grabbed, but Lance’s was hanging back over his shoulder since it was basically useless. He glared at the two druids, then over at the other two as they started to rise, accompanied by the crackling sounds of neck bones moving back into place.

Lance glanced back over the edge, at the drop that waited for him if he took one more step, and then…he smiled.

“Sorry,” he said addressing the druid who’d spoken. “I have to ask my boyfriend first.”

It was already breezy up on the clearing but now a heavy wind whipped up, propelled by thrusters as an enormous black shape rose up above the cliff edge. It was another of those Lions, this one easily dwarfing the blue one, Kuro recognized the voice that spoke over the speakers as the kid wearing the red armor on the comm meeting earlier.

“His boyfriend says no.”

The Lion’s mouth opened and Lance dropped down flat on the ground. As the laser charged to fire Kuro cast a glance back at Allura, who was now pinned against the ground by Honerva. The witch refused to be distracted by what was going on with her druids.

Until the laser fired. The ones who had been advancing on Lance took the full brunt of it, and that made Honerva finally glance away if only to make sure she wasn’t within firing range.

The Lion fired again, this time in his direction, and Kuro launched himself to his feet. He ducked around the fourth surprised druid, who didn’t move fast enough and ended up caught in the laser blast.

Kuro darted across the clearing and slid into Honerva’s legs from the side, whipping them out from under her and bringing her down on top of him in a surprised heap. It wasn’t elegant but it at least pulled her blade away from Allura, and gave the younger woman a chance to scramble for her dropped weapon.

It was the last place Kuro wanted to be. He didn’t even try to do anything else at that point, scrambling out from under Honerva and trying to put distance between them. He didn’t get far before she grabbed his ankle, making him curse the strength Alteans had.

“Go!” Allura was shouting to Lance and the other pilot—Keith?—waving wildly for them to leave. “Stop that mech from bringing down the shield!”

Lance hesitated, but the little bit of protection between the colony and all of the locked out cruisers was fading fast. He stepped back into Black’s open mouth and the Lion rose up into the sky to where a much smaller Red one hovered.

Kuro flipped over and slammed Honerva’s hand with his free foot, jerking himself free. He rolled up to his feet and backed away quickly, but slowed to a stop when he saw that Honerva wasn’t moving.

Neither was Allura. They were both stiff, looking warily at the ground as if expecting something to break free from below the surface.

Kuro felt it a second later, probably nowhere near as strongly as they did but he was definitely sensitive to it. It was a tremor, but not the kind that moved the earth. It was almost like something that moved between molecules, a strange shifting in the way the whole planet behaved that most people probably wouldn’t even notice.

Kuro had felt this before, in the Quantum Abyss. It was a shifting of gravity, something had happened to throw the planet’s balance off kilter. Maybe its rotation was speeding up, maybe it was slowing, but either way there was a wave of energy rippling across its surface disturbing its equilibrium.

Allura recovered and caught his eye, gesturing almost imperceptibly toward Opal. As one, the two of them darted around Honerva and started running for the ship.

Like an asteroid slamming the planet from space, only about twenty miles away a massive body hit the ground hard enough to send an actual tremor across the foothills. Allura lost her balance and fell as the earth shook, the impact of a mech that looked to be made up of the five Lions sent damage radiating outward. A crack ran through the ground between them and the ship, all the way to the edge of the cliff, making them skid to a stop as a small chasm opened up in front of them.

“Watch out!” Allura shouted into her comm. “You’re too close, you’re damaging the colony! There may still be people underground!”

Allura backed up a few steps to take the jump at a short running start and Kuro started to follow suit, but he stopped when he realized Honerva was gone.

“Hey, wait—“ he tried to warn Allura but she was already leaping over the opening, landing on the other side with a roll. Kuro didn’t like not having eyes on Honerva but he started to follow her lead, until the crevice between them flashed with an eerie purple light and the ground at both of its edges started to crumble away.

He barely managed to stop before going over the edge, looking down into the darkness. He thought he heard running water as the fissure cracked down to the surface of the lake and it began to slowly drain into the hollow. He was fairly athletic, but he was pretty sure there was no way he was jumping this.

“Get away from the edge, go to the other side of the clearing,” Allura called, glancing back at him as she ran for Opal. “I’ll come get y--“

She stopped, coming to a halt and looking behind him in a way that made his stomach sink. He knew from Allura’s face that Honerva was there even before he felt her hand rest on his shoulder, the purple light that flickered around her fingers making his hair twitch with static electricity.

“Good of you to finally come out of hiding,” she murmured. “You caused me a lot of trouble by running off, set back my work by decaphoebs. I think it’s time to go home.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Blue didn’t handle anything like the Black Lion, the others hadn’t been wrong in their warnings. Black was large and bulky, sacrificing speed for power, and his weapons were mostly straightforward and caused brunt damage. His movements were basic and his controls did exactly what you told him to do, no frills and nothing special.

Blue, on the other hand, was a dancer. She wasn’t as fast as Red but she was definitely faster than Black, and her controls seemed to function on a hair trigger. Shiro only had to nudge them to send her into a flip or a roll, and it almost seemed as if she finished everything she did with a flourish of her own accord.

The kids had been smart to suggest he stick with Pidge and Hunk, once he was really in the thick of the fight he’d realized they were right. He wouldn’t have been able to lead and concentrate on making the Blue Lion listen, especially since she seemed to have her own ideas about how to handle things and needed to be reined in.

He could see now why Adam would be her Paladin, and why she’d been so accepting of Lance and Allura. Controlling her was like trying to control one of them; they’d eventually do what you asked but there was probably going to be an explosion or fire along the way.

She was a little easier to control once the Lions were merged and her range of movement was subdued, but controlling a leg was a lot different from controlling the head. Shiro was moderately certain that it wasn’t entirely his fault they were getting their asses handed to them, but he still couldn’t help feeling like he might have something to do with it.

“Guys, get me the sword!” Keith called as Shiro and Hunk dug in to stop them from being shoved backward by the force of the shot they’d just taken. “Our shield’s not going to hold against this much longer, we need to take it out.”

“What about the colony?” Pidge asked. “It’s right under us, we could do some serious damage.”

“It won’t let us lure it away, we’re just going to have to risk it,” Lance answered.

“Acxa, what’s the status of the colony shield?” Keith patched in the other open comm links that were outside of the Lions’. “How much longer?”

“Give us two minutes,” Acxa responded. She sounded out of breath, from exertion. “The last of the Galra have been forced out of the borders, and the prisoners from the mine are almost all here. Maya and Keela are still out in the open with two of the weaker ones who fell behind.”

“We don’t have two minutes,” Hunk warned.

“Put up the barrier,” James ordered. “Tell the people left outside it to divert to the north. There’s a dry riverbed there that’s out of the fighting zone. The MFEs are running low on charge, we’ll pick them up there on our way out.”

“All right, here goes nothing I guess,” Lance murmured.

Down below, the colony’s particle barrier rose, encompassing the town, the forest around it, and the cliff behind it in a blue light. The purple barrier keeping back the Galra ships was weak, flickering in some places, but for now it remained.

The second barrier going up distracted the mech’s pilot, giving Lance and Pidge a moment to drop the shield and summon their sword.

“Give me wings!” Keith ordered as the mech’s chest cavity opened to fire again.

Shiro braced himself, but was still unprepared for the force of the sudden speed. He’d never been in a Lion with the wings deployed, it was definitely an experience.

Even more of an experience was the force of the sword hitting an invisible barrier, and the quintessence feedback that ran through the blade and into the Lions. It felt like an electrical shock, throwing them backwards.

“What the hell was that?” Shiro asked, throwing a lever forward to try and keep them on their feet. “Where did that come from?”

“The mechs must be connected somehow!” Pidge reasoned. “That thing knew what our move would be, the mech we fought on Earth had to have uploaded its data before initiating the self destruct!”

“That sounds like it doesn’t mean anything good!” Lance groaned.

“It means the one move we have that could take one of those things down doesn’t work anymore,” Hunk answered. “Oh, crap, it’s coming right for us!”

“Evasive maneuvers!” Shiro commanded. “Hunk, up!”

They threw Blue’s and Yellow’s thrusters up to full capacity, lurching upward and just barely avoiding having the mech’s staff pierce clear through the Black Lion’s torso. The mech missed and lost balance, but quickly righted itself and followed.

“We can’t go far,” Pidge warned. “That shield may be keeping those ships out, but it’s also keeping us in.”

“That thing is too fast to shake,” Keith grunted. “The barrier is the least of our worries. Guys, get ready to even out as soon as we reach it, turn south and keep all thrusters at full force.”

They were just about at the point of changing direction when the mech poured on speed and shot past them. At Keith’s command Shiro threw on the brakes, trying to reverse and get out of range.

The mech slammed its staff into the barrier, pulling the energy out of it. On its last legs, the shield finally gave way and flickered out, leaving open sky for the Galra ships waiting overhead.

And it wasn’t over yet. Before they could get up the speed to get back out of range the mech opened up and fired, hitting them with a blast that rattled Shiro down to his teeth.

He revved up his accelerator again, but this time got no response. One by one his monitors flicked off, and the lights on his control panel went out. It was exactly what had happened after Blue had been hit by that blast from Honerva’s cruiser.

Shiro felt the Lions disengage, then his viewscreen went dark and he heard even the life support go off. His stomach fluttered then, the sensation of free fall as they all plummeted down toward the ground below.

The cockpit was completely black, Blue still hadn’t fully recovered from the reset she’d needed after the last hit. It was a horrific replay of the Last Stand, only this time Shiro was on the falling end with the others instead of watching it happen. He worked his controls as he felt his panic starting to rise, knowing exactly what was going to happen to him if he hit the ground like this.

No shields, no dampeners. And this time, no Atlas pilots to pry them free and no Garrison hospital for them to be ferried to for emergency care.

He had no idea how long he’d been falling or when he was going to hit the ground. Shiro’s heart was pounding and he was short of breath, unable to see anything or do anything to change the course of his crash.

And then, a brief flash of cold before the blackness was chased away by bright blue light.

Shiro continued to fall, but now it was only about a yard and it was to land face-down on stone. He pushed himself up, confused, wondering if he’d hit the ground and died but hadn’t realized it yet.

He heard a pop, and a strangled noise of surprise, and then somebody landed on top of him.

“What the hell was that?” Shiro recognized Lance’s voice, high-pitched and panicked. He sat up, pushing the younger pilot off him. “Oh…oh, I’m alive.”

Lance was feeling his face and limbs to make sure everything was still there. Shiro looked up, and realized they were now on the inside of the particle barrier at the feet of some kind of platform where Lotor was sagging tiredly against a computer console.

Another pop. This time it was Keith who was dropped down on them, shocked and confused, before their furry savior disappeared again.

Hoshi.

Shiro shoved Keith off of him, hard, and shot to his feet, spinning around and searching the sky. He saw them, the five Lions, careening down toward the ground in all directions. Hoshi returned again with Hunk and disappeared, and in the last few seconds before the giant ships slammed into the earth and threw up dust clouds that briefly blocked out the setting sun, she appeared with Pidge.

“Where did _he_ come from?” Keith asked, staring at Hoshi.

“She,” Shiro corrected absently, looking back up to the sky with a feeling of dread. “She’s Kuro’s.”

There had still been a small handful of cruisers under the barrier before they’d gotten sidetracked by the mech, but now that it was gone the ones that had gathered were starting to descend. Adam had gotten rid of half of them but enough to surround a planet had still remained, and although they’d taken down many of them plenty more were still arriving from other hemispheres.

“Curtis, status report,” Shiro commanded, opening his comm lines. He received no reply. “Curtis, come in. Coran, Sam, Matt. Slav…somebody. Anybody.”

“Lines are dead,” Keith observed.

“That one druid said the Atlas had probably already fallen in Honerva’s trap,” Lance said hesitantly. “I thought they were just playing head games, but they’re not answering and that other mech isn’t here. Do you think…?”

“We don’t have time to think about it now,” Shiro interrupted, watching the mech hone in on the colony’s particle barrier and start to approach. He looked around, at the empty promenade where they stood. There were still Altean colonists out here, exhausted and sick and hiding as best they could in the rubble of their homes, too slow to make it into the command center and down into the safety floors before the fighting started. “We have to do something to protect these people if that particle barrier comes down.”

“Where’s Allura?” Pidge asked, looking around. “She was supposed to come.”

“She and Kuro were fighting Honerva,” Keith answered, looking up toward the cliff. “That mech was about to bring down the upper barrier, Lance and I had to leave them and go.”

The feeling of dread that was tickling at the edge of Shiro’s mind grew more pronounced. He had specifically put Kuro with Allura to try and keep him safe, he was now responsible for anything that happened up there.

“You left them up there with Honerva?”

It was Lotor who was speaking, pushing himself up from where he had been sitting, drained, at the foot of the platform controls. He looked horrified, and after what he and Keith had seen at the destroyed outpost Shiro couldn’t blame him.

But if anyone could stand on equal footing against Honerva, it was Allura.

There was a flash of light as the mech slammed its staff into the particle barrier, beginning to siphon off the power. The colonists still out in the open screamed, and Acxa ran past him with a handful of Hira’s guards.

“Inside!” She yelled over the noise, starting to direct people around the edges of the promenade. “Everybody get inside! Get inside and get downstairs! If you’re strong enough, help anyone who can’t walk! Hurry!”

“Lotor, how long will that barrier hold up?” Shiro asked, watching the blue start to flicker.

“Not long enough.”

“Can you do something? Is there any way to reinforce it with the terraformer?”

“It’s not designed to fully work with my alignment,” Lotor answered. “If it was, we wouldn’t need Allura.”

“Lance can work it,” Keith piped up.

“Keith,” Lance hissed in warning. Keith ignored him.

“He’ll need help, but he can do it. If Lotor can direct the device, Lance can probably power it.”

Shiro looked over at Lance, who had gone a bit pale. It felt like it had been years since he’d spoken to this kid in a hospital room on Earth, a lifetime since he’d offered him a spot on the Atlas crew. He’d been forced to come a very long way in a very short time, and none of the journey had been by choice.

“Lance, I know this seems like a big burden to dump on you,” Shiro admitted. “It probably feels like we’re putting the weight of everyone here on your shoulders. But we’re down to the wire and all out of options, anything you can do to hold that thing off a little longer is more than enough.”

Lance hesitated, and Shiro knew why. There was a lot riding on this, and he was afraid of failure. Not necessarily that he might fail, but of what might happen to so many people if he did.

Everyone looked up as the particle barrier started to come down.

“Now or never,” Lotor called. “Lance, get over here!”

Lance hopped up on the platform and ran to the controls looking at them uncertainly. Lotor pressed Lance’s hands onto the control pads and started to instruct him. The seconds ticked by, painfully quick, as innocent civilians rushed inside as quickly as their exhausted bodies could manage and the world slowly crumbled around them.

After a moment the lights on the platform started to blink on, not the bright purple he had seen previously when flying above but a pure, aqua blue. The system started to power up, and over in the distance Shiro could see the lights on the shield pillar begin to come on dimly.

The colony’s particle barrier went down as whatever power source they were using for it was finally drained. But in its place a net of blue began to weave into existence, covering the sky again. It was lower than the previous shield, locking out all but a few of the Galra ships and leaving them faced with only a couple of those and the mech.

Carnelian and Jade whizzed by, firing off shots at the mech as they went and drawing its attention. Shiro’s heart was in his throat as it flew off after them, only seconds before potentially killing them all with one decently aimed hit. He looked back over at Lotor and Lance.

“Any chance of getting the colony barrier back up?” He asked.

“If we can get enough power going,” Lotor said. “It’s looking good, but it’s not going as fast as I would like.”

“It’s being wonky,” Lance complained, his eyes closed as he concentrated. “It’s hard to control.”

“Somebody opened wormholes close to the planet,” Lotor answered, not looking up from the console he was working on. “The system picked up two just a little bit ago. The gravitational waves are interfering with the terraformer, it’s trying to convert them into a power source but that’s far above your level or mine…which is a problem.”

“Why?” Hunk asked. “What happens if those waves don’t get converted into power?”

“The waves given off by a wormhole are more than just gravity, it’s a manipulation of space time,” Lotor answered. “A flash point of infinite mass causes a hole to open in one point of reality and lead to another, but in order to have that hole open long enough the gravity that causes it is alchemically frozen. What Lance is feeling are the first edges of the wave beginning to be released from that hold…once the effect wears off, the intense gravity caused by the wormholes will flow out over the planet.”

“And if it isn’t harnessed, everything in its path gets crushed,” Shiro finished for him.

“Indeed,” Lotor answered, glancing up. “However, it’s presence is very fortuitous. If we’re able to convert that wave, the planet’s core won’t have to be touched. The issue is building up enough power now to get the terraformer running at a level that it can handle it.”

“Hunk, Pidge, help Acxa and Hira get the rest of these people inside,” Shiro ordered, knowing Keith wouldn’t leave Lance here even if he was told to. “Then stay in there and help them keep everyone calm.”

They ran to do as asked, and Shiro turned back to Lotor.

“How likely are we to get this thing running well enough to handle two wormholes worth of gravity?”

“Let me put it to you this way,” Lotor offered, still not looking up from his work. “At least when you’re inevitably crushed to death within the next half a varga you probably won’t feel a thing.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Allura heard the crashing of the Lions, but she didn’t dare look away from Honerva. The barrier in the sky was gone and her heart sank at the thought of what had become of the others, the memory of the Last Stand and those horrible few final moments still fresh in her mind. But she couldn’t even spare a glance, not with their enemy right in front of her.

In front of her, and separated from her by a chasm too wide for Allura to cross.

Kuro was silent, but his body language screamed that he was terrified. He was stiff, frozen in place, a faint trembling visible in his hands. Clone or not, Shiro, Lotor, and Curtis were right; he was not one of Honerva’s mindless puppets. The only control she exerted over him was that of fear.

So Allura was just as surprised as Honerva when Kuro reached up and grabbed her wrist in spite of the fact that his hands shook.

“I don’t like it,” he said softly, almost too quiet to be heard, as he wrenched her forward with his left hand while slamming his right elbow back into her gut, “when people touch me,” he threw her forward over his shoulder so she slammed into the ground, losing his balance and falling with her only to push her hard with both feet so she fell over the edge of the crevice, “without permission!”

She didn’t fall completely, she still had a grip on the edge and pulled herself up, but it gave Kuro a chance to scramble to his feet. Unfortunately, he only managed to run a few yards before Honerva teleported in front of him and brought him to a halt.

Instinct seemed to kick in then. Shiro was an unstoppable typhoon of brute force when he got started, but Kuro reminded Allura more of the figure skaters in videos Veronica and shown her and Romelle. He was completely in defensive mode, bending and twisting and spinning in a way that looked like something more at home in a ballet studio than a battlefield.

It was effective at keeping him from taking any hits, but he wasn’t fighting back. He was more than likely still scared, still working on the ingrained lessons that he should never raise a hand against his abuser. It was probably going to take him a bit to shake that.

Allura looked around for something she could do to help, but her sword was no good from where she was standing. Lance and Kuro had dropped their guns here when they were being dragged by the druids, but he and Honerva were moving so quickly there was no way Allura would be able to get a decent shot without possibly hitting the wrong person.

The particle barrier that had been covering the colony below and half of the clearing where they were fighting was down. The mech was on the move, heading for the town. Everything was falling apart, they were losing this fight.

Kuro took a hit that sent him skidding across the grass, coming to a stop precariously close to the cliff edge. At the same time, Romelle and Veronica flew by in Jade and Carnelian, distracting the mech and sending it chasing after them. Allura knew they didn’t stand a chance alone, and that right now Sincline was the only defense this planet had left.

She met Kuro’s eyes as he got up and knew he was thinking the same thing. He glanced back over the cliff edge, then looked back at her.

“Go!” He yelled. “Stop that thing!”

“Wait,” Allura thought she knew what he was planning but she couldn’t believe he would really do it. “Stop, get away from the edge!”

Instead he looked back at Honerva and let out a shrill whistle that echoed out over the cliff and clearing.

“If you really want me, I guess you’re going to have to come get me.”

He leaned back, pushing off the cliff edge with his feet as he fell. Allura screamed and started to run for the ledge as Honerva swore and did the same, but then a ceiling of blue lit up the sky and made her look upwards.

The barrier was back up, holding back the Galra fleet, and it wasn’t Lotor powering it. With a bit of luck, that might mean it could stay up longer if that mech could be taken out.

Allura looked back down, but found Honerva nowhere to be seen. She wanted to look for Kuro but Opal was desperately needed, and it was one of the hardest choices she’d ever made in her life to turn around and run back to her ship.

As much as she hated it, she couldn’t be distracted by what was going down below. She had to trust whoever was left to do their part on the ground, she was needed in the sky.

* * * * * * * * * *

Keith heard the whistle echo out from above and he swiveled to look in its direction along with everyone else. Only Lance remained unmoved, his eyes closed in concentration and refusing to be distracted. It was evening now and the sun had almost set, it was only from the faint light of the barrier overhead that he recognized Kuro’s dark outline standing on the cliff edge by his armor.

“What is he doing?” Keith asked, frowning as Kuro leaned backwards. “Is he—”

He choked off the rest of the words as Kuro plummeted from the edifice, drawing gasps from everyone who was looking. Keith took a few steps forward without thinking, his instinct to help kicking in before he realized there was a lake where Kuro would hit and there was no way for any of them to get out there.

He was almost bowled over as Hoshi ran past him, disappearing with a faint pop. He saw her appear in midair and Kuro reach for her before they both flickered out again, and realized what the whistle had been for. A second later the two of them popped up at the edge of the promenade, Kuro hugging the wolf tightly and looking like he might faint.

“Not fun,” he mumbled, letting go of Hoshi and falling to lay back on the ground. “Never doing that again.”

It was on the tip of Keith’s tongue to ask where Allura was, but up ahead he saw her ship take off and go after Romelle and Veronica. They desperately needed her here, but he knew they needed Sincline to hold off that mech as long as possible. Lance was just going to have to step up his game.

A dark light flashed and another form appeared on the middle of the bridge between the promenade and the command building. Hoshi started to growl as Honerva walked toward them, and Keith drew his bayard and stepped between her and Lance. But his blade only kept its form for a few seconds before it sputtered away, the dead Lions unable to power his weapon.

Honerva’s eyes were on Kuro as she approached, and on Shiro who had come to stand beside him. Kuro scampered backwards until he hit the low wall around the promenade and couldn’t go any farther, and Hoshi lowered her head and bared her teeth as Honerva reached the end of the bridge and got closer.

It was Shiro who acted first, summoning the bladed bayard and charging Honerva to cut her off from gaining anymore ground. Keith looked around for a weapon he could use, but he knew that even if he found one he would be better off staying out of the fight. He had barely been able to operate his Lion with the damage to his arm, stepping into the fray like this would only distract Shiro.

“Keep this program running,” Lotor startled Keith by grabbing him from behind and shoving him toward the platform’s console. He knelt down and grabbed one of the little cases that he’d given to Acxa earlier, tearing open one of the syringes she had brought out and trying to fill it from one of the vials. “When the warning comes up, just keep canceling it.”

Keith looked at the viewscreen in front of him and tried to figure out what the hell he was even looking at. The only Altean technology he really knew was his Lion, he hadn’t even bothered to listen to any of the overviews of the Atlas that Sam had given because he’d never thought he’d need to know any of it. His experience was with Galra tech, this was not his skill set. He might have been able to run a basic scan or use more common programs, but this wasn't anything he'd seen before.

It looked like Lotor had been charging up the terraformer and running a program to distribute power evenly to the nodes around the colony. The warning Lotor mentioned popped up but he couldn’t read it since it was in Altean. From the look of it though, it appeared to be telling him that if he continued to unevenly distribute power the overcharged nodes might explode. At least, that was what he assumed the way the dots that marked the pillars around the planet flashed red meant.

Keith canceled the warning and looked across the promenade. Shiro had always been an impressive fighter, in Keith’s eyes there had never been anyone better, but right now he was practically a blur of movement as he threw everything he had into fighting off Honerva. Kuro had shaken off his surprise and joined him, the two giving her a run for her money Keith hoped would buy them the time they needed to get this thing fully charged.

It wasn’t hard to see that Shiro and Kuro shared a reaction time and thought process. Their fighting styles were vastly different, Shiro relying on slicing and physical blows while Kuro backed him up with jumps and kicks, but they moved like they were one person. One would swing and the other would give room, missing each other by what looked like barely centimeters and forming a barrier together that Honerva couldn’t get past.

She had her magic but it only helped her so much. Every time she teleported to come up behind them she was met by Hoshi appearing between her and her target, and was forced to back off if she didn’t want to lose a chunk of flesh.

But as Keith knew all too well, although fights were made mostly of skill they were also made partially of luck. Eventually Honerva managed to catch Kuro’s ankle during one of his kicks, and used the momentum to swing him around and throw him across the promenade into a wall. That left Shiro on his own, and he barely ducked to avoid taking a quintessence-charged fist to the face.

He was put on the defensive, ducking and weaving. Keith canceled the program warning again, unsure of how to read any of this to know if the damn terraformer was even doing what they wanted. He looked over at Lance, who was frowning with his eyes closed and looked like he was starting to strain, then back at the fight.

Kuro was getting to his feet, but his head had gotten a good hit and it was taking him a minute to recover. Shiro blocked a kick with his bayard but ended up with it knocked out of his hand and skidding across the ground. It returned to him, but in those few seconds when it was little more than liquid light Honerva summoned a sword of quintessence and brought it down on him.

Shiro blocked with his prosthetic arm. Although it looked like a normal limb while covered with the armor, the gem embedded in the back of his hand flashed and glowed through his glove as Shiro raised his forearm to catch the blade. The force of the blow pushed him down to his knees and his armor chipped as the weapon sliced through, but Honerva’s swing was brought to an abrupt halt as it was met with Allura’s creation.

Shiro looked briefly surprised even as he pushed back, then smirked ever so slightly when he realized she couldn’t cut thought he arm.

“I guess Allura really is getting better than you.”

It was a calculated insult meant to hit a power-hungry megalomaniac where it hurt, and for a moment it worked. Honerva started to lose her temper, her full focus on Shiro as she started swinging wildly.

It was what Lotor was apparently waiting for. Keith hadn’t seen him maneuvering into position, but now he appeared out of the shadows to catch her from behind. He would have been able to get her with the syringe, if the Sincline and the mech it was fighting with hadn’t moved overhead in that moment, the lasefire lighting up the area and letting Honerva see his shadow coming up behind her.

She spun around and grabbed Lotor’s wrist, twisting it and pulling the syringe free. She slammed it into his neck and emptied it, then threw him backwards and turned back to Shiro. He was coming at her with his bayard redrawn, but she sidestepped him and grabbed him by his hair, throwing him to the ground. She rammed his head forward into the stone, dazing him and stopping him from getting up as she pressed the syringe into his neck as well and filled it with a blood sample.

As she rose she lifted Shiro by the back of his armor and flung him into a nearby building. It was fire-damaged and weak, and before he could get up the wall crumbled and pinned him down.

Honerva stepped back and looked around at the carnage, tucking the syringe away in one of the pockets of her armor.

“No!” Kuro exclaimed, shaking off his daze. “She can’t take that!”

He darted across the promenade but he was still slowed by the blow to his head. The ground started to shake violently, forcing Keith to grip the console to stay upright, and he whipped around to look at the viewscreens.

The aftermath of the wormholes was starting to wash over the planet. The readings were starting to go crazy as the alchemy that kept the gravity of the infinite mass flash in check faded.

Kuro went flying past him, this time rolling clear off the edge and into the lake. Keith looked up from the console and found Honerva standing in front of him. He fumbled to try his bayard again, knowing he was the only thing between her and Lance, but there was still no power to it. Another tremor hit, his hurt arm keeping him from getting his balance, and she took advantage of that to take a swing.

He instinctively closed his eyes and tensed, waiting for the impact. When it didn’t come he cracked open one eye to find her fist only a few inches from his face.

It was held in place by a black gloved hand that had caught it, stopping her dead in her tracks. Lance stood next to him, one arm outstretched to block the blow that had been coming at Keith, the rest of his body perfectly at ease in spite of the violent shaking all around him. Lance was calm, almost stone-faced, regarding Honerva with a look that bordered on indifference.

If the black-eyed stare of an entity-controlled druid could be called indifference. This wasn’t Lance.

The sudden twisting of Honerva’s arm and the unnatural way in which it bent snapped Keith out of his surprise. He looked up and realized now that the barrier was gone, and the Galra cruisers were now starting to fire on the pillars that had been used to create it. Up in the air they had Allura, Romelle, and Veronica in the Sincline, but everybody else was down for the count.

It was only Honerva and Lance still standing, and Keith had no weapon to face whichever one came out victorious.

The next movements were so fast Keith barely followed them. Lance pushed Honerva’s arm up, ducking under it and twisting it around behind her back as he came up behind her. He grabbed her hair, kicked her knee out from under her, and as she went down he used the momentum to propel her forward and ram her head into the ground. He slammed her face into the stone three more times, hard enough to crack it, then lifted her up and threw her across the promenade into its low wall.

Even so, she was an unstoppable force. In an instant she was back on her feet, her arm snapping back into place as she stalked forward to meet him. The flurry of blows consistently made contact but neither one of them went down, even though armor cracked and broke.

The colony was crumbling around them, huge cracks opening in the ground as the gravity swell started to take over. Honerva landed a hit on Lance that sent him skidding across the promenade, but he dug in his feet and one hand and brought himself to a stop in a crouch. His expression finally changed, albeit slightly, as the corner of his mouth curled up into a smirk that was very much not like Lance.

He rose, but instead of coming back to Honerva he took a few steps to the side, to where Shiro lay on the ground. He held his hand out open, palm down, and the gem on the back of Shiro’s hand started to glow.

Whatever it was he wanted, Allura’s gem wasn’t giving it up easily. Lance clenched his hand into a fist and made a motion as if jerking something upwards, and Shiro’s arm twitched. Something came forcefully out of hiding there, the same way his bayard came and went, a small glowing stone that rose up to where Lance could grab it out of the air.

The Infinite Zero core.

Lance kept his gaze on Honerva as he stepped up onto the platform, the smirk still in place as he stopped at the control pads. He tilted his head to the side wordlessly as he looked at her, holding the core up for her to see as if daring her to make a move. Honerva’s eyes narrowed and her teeth clenched, but she didn’t dare come closer.

Lance closed his hand around the little crystal and slammed his other one down on a control pad. The Infinite Zero flashed brightly, and Honerva immediately teleported away to escape whatever was coming next.

Keith lost his footing and went down with the violent shaking, the platform itself starting to crack. On the screen, the power levels that had been climbing painfully slowly shot up, everything turning green and ready to go. In the distance the pillars started to glow brighter than he had seen them do so far. It built up slowly at first, then shone like a beacon as the terraformer activated.

The sky exploded in an alien aurora as pillars all over the planet began sapping the residual power from the wormholes, whatever crazy alchemical algorithms the damned things worked on converting the gravitational waves into a power source just as Lotor said might happen. Instead of a particle barrier going up, this time the pillars sent up a shock wave that exploded the Galra cruisers flooding the sky in a wave of glowing destruction.

Keith had to hide his face and try to cover his ears, the noise was deafening and the light was blinding. It was like standing at the end of the world with the universe turning to dust around him, the violent force being propelled upward made the air on the surface run hot and dance with static.

Like a door being closed against a hurricane, it all ended abruptly. The noise was replaced by a soft whining as the terraformer wound down, and the light was replaced by the dark of night and the sparks of broken wires throughout the colony. The sky was lit by nothing but stars and the distant wreckage of ship remains raining out of the sky, burning up as it came down.

Keith pushed himself up and looked around, trying to find his friends in the dark. Lance still stood in the middle of the platform, his face illuminated by the crystal he held in his hand. The black eyes gazed at it, head tilted in curiosity, as fingers turned it over to look at it from different angles. After a few moments he seemed to grow bored with it.

The last thing Keith saw before he dropped the crystal at his feet was Lance blink, the blackness replaced by unfocused, crystalline blues that rolled back in Lance’s head as he passed out on the ground.


	25. Chapter 25

_**Years ago**_ :

“What the hell is this?”

Curtis looked up from working the cork out of a bottle of wine to find Adam standing at the top of the stairs. He was leaning over the banister, dangling a black leather harness over the side for Curtis to see. Curtis set down the bottle and gave him a ‘what the hell’ gesture.

“Why do you have that?” He demanded. “Why were you in my room?”

“I was up here unsupervised, why would you even think I wouldn’t go in your room?” Adam asked as he came back downstairs.

“Because you’ve been in my house for all of ten minutes and you were only supposed to be putting your bag in the guest room!” Curtis shot back. He grabbed the harness out of Adam’s hand as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not mine, it’s my ex’s.”

“Why do you still have your ex’s sex harness?”

Curtis rolled his eyes and grabbed the wine bottle, slinging the harness over his shoulder so he could walk into the living room while still working on the corkscrew. For somebody who was going through an emotional crisis, Adam was still finding the energy to be as insufferable as ever.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” Curtis asked. “Toss it in the trash? The weirdo down the block goes through peoples’ garbage.”

“Then mail it back,” Adam answered, following him. “You don’t keep that shit, Curt, it’s weird.”

“I can’t mail it back, I don’t have his address.”

The cork came free. Curtis set it and the corkscrew down on the sofa end table as he passed, grabbing two glasses off the tray that sat on the living room wet bar.

“Curtis.” Adam’s voice was dripping with disappointment.

Curtis kept his attention on filling his wine glass, swirling the liquid around and pointedly not looking at him.

“Curtis.” Adam repeated more firmly. Curtis still didn’t look at him, so Adam planted himself in front of him. “Is he in prison?”

“You’re a very judgmental person, you know that?” Curtis asked, avoiding the question.

“Oh my God, he’s in prison,” Adam groaned, turning away and running his hands through his hair. “Why do you keep dating felons!?”

“I don’t keep dating felons,” Curtis answered, annoyed. He began filling a second glass.

“No?”

“No.”

“Reggie,” Adam accused, counting off on his fingers. “Carl.”

“They’re not felons.”

“Sorry, convicts,” Adam corrected himself.

“Carl was never convicted,” Curtis answered. “He was only tried.”

“For _murder_.”

“Manslaughter.”

“Making somebody dead,” Adam said firmly. “Reggie was…assault?”

“Drug smuggling,” Curtis said helpfully. “John was assault.”

“John was assault,” Adam repeated. “Steve was gun charges. Mark knocked over a liquor store. And you don’t even date smart convicts, they were all dumber than a sack of rocks.”

“But pretty,” Curtis pointed out. “So very pretty.”

“Sure, if you’re turned on by teardrop tattoos,” Adam grumbled, accepting the wine glass Curtis passed to him.

“Can I just point out that I’m letting you stay at my place fresh out of the hospital because you’re hiding from your roommate?” Curtis asked. “How about you lecture me on my choices in men when you’re not afraid to go back to your own home because you just found out the boy who lives there thinks you’re cute.”

Adam winced and flopped down on the sofa to sip from his glass. Curtis had picked him up from the hospital about an hour ago, and they’d stopped by his apartment so he could grab some clothes while Captain Shirogane was still on duty.

It was kind of funny, but it also wasn’t. For as long as he’d known Adam, Curtis had been aware that he had a tendency to react very poorly to strong feelings of any sort. He had offered his guest room for a few days because he’d known if he didn’t Adam would probably rent a hotel room. If he was left alone in this state, his diet for the next week would probably be whiskey and bad pay-per-view.

“I did warn you, you know,” Curtis reminded him. “I told you years ago he wasn’t straight, you didn’t want to listen.”

“You were telling me I wasn’t straight too, I couldn’t trust your shitty judgement,” Adam grunted.

“You’re not. If you were you would’ve told him thanks but no thanks and moved on already. You’re in the second stage of Bi Panic.”

“I’m not panicking.”

“Denial. The second stage is denial,” Curtis said. “The first is shock. You know, when you high-fived him.”

Adam gave a little whine and slid down further in his seat, grabbing one of the throw pillows and covering his face. Curtis could see from where he was sitting that his ears were turning red, he didn’t have to see the rest of the blush to know it was there.

“Why are you even freaking out?” Curtis wondered. “You’ve been living with him for a couple years now. You do his laundry, he buys you flowers. You hang out with Raina now and then but you haven’t dated anyone else since you moved in with him…I’ve even seen you two literally share a soda with two straws like a weird Sunday comic strip couple.”

“It’s not like that!” Adam exclaimed, muffled by the pillow. “We’re not a couple!”

“Has he ever slept in your bed?” Curtis asked curiously.

“Absolutely not!”

“Right, right, you have that thing about letting people into your space. Have you ever slept in his?” Curtis pried. Adam didn’t answer that one. “So yes, then.”

“It’s not LIKE THAT!” Adam screeched into the pillow, sliding down so he was lying completely horizontal now. Curtis wondered if he might accidentally suffocate himself.

“Look, there’s a really easy way to solve your problem,” Curtis offered. “Sleep with him. The next day you’ll either still want to see his face every day or you’ll want him to move out.”

Adam sat up, throwing a pillow at him. Curtis caught it with his free hand, holding out his wine glass so it didn’t spill.

“Not everything is solved with no-strings sex, jerkface,” Adam said hotly. “We don’t all have commitment issues, some of us have problems that need a more tactful response.”

“I do not have commitment issues,” Curtis snorted.

“Yeah, okay.” Adam rolled his eyes derisively. “That’s why you only date dudes you know are going to go back to jail eventually so you don’t have to get serious for too long. Sure.”

“I don’t have commitment issues,” Curtis repeated, “I don’t believe in settling down. There’s a difference.”

“You know, one of these days you’re going to meet somebody who ticks all of your stupid leather and chains boxes but who’s actually relatively law-abiding and nice,” Adam warned. “You’re going to be that sorry asshole who turns into the poster child for love at first sight, and ends up wanting to get married in Vegas after two weeks. Because whether you like it or not you’re also a stupidly nice guy. And then you’ll understand what actual relationship problems are.”

Curtis looked at him over his glass, annoyed. Called out like this, in his own home, it was a travesty. Especially coming from this walking disaster.

“I know you’re turning this around on me because you can’t handle the fact that your boyfriend wants to get in your pants, but there’s not enough Chianti in this house for me to deal with your bullshit right now,” he said, kicking away from the chair he was leaning against and going to the bottom of the stairs. “GAIL!”

“WHAT?” His housemate yelled from upstairs.

“You’ve both lived here for years, do you really not understand the concept of the intercom system you have yet?” Adam complained from the living room.

“ADAM NEEDS THE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT LESBIAN!”

“Adam needs a bottle of vodka and a trip to the strip club,” came the grumbled response from the sofa.

“Oh, knock it off you edgy little virgin, you wouldn’t know what to do with a stripper if you had one,” Curtis returned. A door opened on the second floor and Gail came downstairs in her yoga pants and an oversized sweater, pulling her dark, curly hair up out of her face.

“What happened?” She asked as she followed Curtis into the living room. “Why is he suffocating himself with our pillows? If he dies here the police will have questions.”

“He just found out his husband is gay,” Curtis answered, emptying his glass and grabbing the bottle to refill it. He settled down in the chair across from the sofa, crossing his legs. “He’s not taking it well.”

“Oh, poor boo,” Gail said sympathetically, padding over to sit on the edge of the sofa and pry the pillow away from Adam’s face. “It can’t be that bad.”

“Shirogane used the “L” word,” Curtis added.

“He didn’t!”

“He did. And Adam’s response was a high five.”

“You _didn’t,_ ” Gail turned on Adam, aghast, whacking him with the pillow she’d pulled out of his hands. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Ow, stop, I’m delicate!” Adam tried to defend himself from the pillow. “Is this what you call emotional support?”

“In the military it is,” Gail answered, giving him one more thwack. “Sit up. And don’t touch that wine, you’re still underage. You and I are going to have a talk. Curtis, go make coffee.”

Curtis lowered his glass, looking at them over it.

“…this is my house,” he reminded them, gesturing around the room. “That you’re both staying in right now. For free.”

“I know, but I don’t like your coffee maker and Adam is delicate,” Gail answered. She frowned then, as her eyes fell on the leather harness lying over the arm of the chair. “Oh, ugh, is Brutus back out of jail again?”

“Hold up,” Adam shot up into a sitting position. “You’re shitting me, the dude’s name is _Brutus_? Like, for real?”

“I can’t take you people,” Curtis complained, getting up and grabbing the half-empty wine bottle. He paused to grab the harness off the chair, stalking out of the room toward the kitchen to make a fast escape. “I’m going to go make coffee.”

* * * * * * * * * *

 _ **Current day**_ :

“He’s definitely asleep now, and he’ll stay that way until we wake him up,” Allura announced. “How long was he awake?”

“Only a minute or two,” Curtis answered. “Matt and I came down to check on him while Sam and Coran were resetting the power. He was so out of it I doubt he’ll even remember he woke up at all.”

They were in the Atlas’ medical bay, standing around the healing pod where Adam was sleeping peacefully. The power outage caused by the EMP had shut down the pods and he’d briefly awakened, but everything was up and running again and the pod was working its magic.

“He’s a mess,” Lance frowned, chewing his lip worriedly. “He’s covered in blood and dirt. When can we clean him up?”

“He needs to be in here for a few more hours to get to a point where he’s stable enough to be out of the pod that long,” Kuro answered, not looking up from the tablet he was tapping as he ran diagnostics. “Then it will have to be quick and he’s got to go back in.”

“How long are we talking?” Shiro asked. He was over next to Lance, looking at the pod almost longingly. “In total, I mean? Before he’s well enough to be released?”

Kuro didn’t say anything. The only answer was the faint beeping of him hitting buttons.

“Kuro?” Shiro pressed. “How long?”

“He can come out in a couple days if he takes a luferin shot daily. Which is great, if you’re into making somebody relive the thing that was used to torture them every morning.”

It was the first time Curtis had heard a sharp edge on Kuro’s voice. Even at his most upset, he’d still been all sweetness and light. Now that it was somebody else’s well being in question instead of his own, though, it appeared the claws were coming out. Kuro caught himself, irritably flicking an app off his screen and opening something else.

“Two months, minimum.”

“Two months?” Lance repeated. “He has to be stuck in there for two months? For what?”

“For me to try and reverse engineer what she did to him,” Kuro was trying to keep his usual light demeanor, but the undercurrent of impatience was almost palpable. “Unless your primitive backwater planet has spontaneously developed complete organ system replacement therapy since you were last there.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro broke in, resting a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “It will be fine. He’s been through a lot, a couple months of undisturbed rest might not be so bad for him.”

“What about you?” Allura asked, turning to look at Lance. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah, but I just want to go on record as saying I’m really disappointed that none of you have seen any old sci-fi horror movies,” Lance answered dully, rubbing his arm as he followed Allura and Keith to one of the other pods. “This is literally what happened between the first and second movies. Sigourney Weaver went to sleep in a cryo pod at the end of one and woke up with a chestburster in her in the second.”

“I have no idea what most of those words mean,” Allura answered. “But I promise that nothing will be bursting out of your chest. How are you feeling? Anything from the entity?”

They had found Lance unconscious an hour ago when the Atlas had arrived at the colony, managing to get up and running shortly after the strange wave of energy had cleared the sky of all ships. Keith had gotten him to wake up while Curtis, Matt, and Sam were helping Kuro get Shiro free from the rubble of a collapsed wall.

Once Keith had told everyone what happened, this had been their destination. They’d given Lance just enough time to get a quick shower and get out of his armor, but time was of the essence in getting him contained.

“I feel fine,” Lance admitted, doing some little stretches. “Great, actually, better than I have in a while. I don’t feel anything. Honestly, if it wasn’t for that black mark on my neck I wouldn’t know anything was there.”

“Still no memory of anything that happened?” Keith asked.

“Nothing,” Lance shook his head. “One minute I was keeping the barrier powered, the next I was waking up with you shaking me like a maraca. My last two brain cells say thanks for that, by the way.”

“It was the only way they were ever going to meet in the emptiness,” Keith answered, frowning slightly. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? There’s no telling how long you’ll be in there.”

“However long it takes Allura to figure out how to get this thing out is fine with me,” Lance said as he stepped into the open pod. “But I’d appreciate sooner a little more than later.”

“It will be my first priority,” Allura promised. “We’ll get you out of here as soon as we can, Lance.”

Lance gave a tight smile and flashed two thumbs up as the pod closed up. Allura set it to put him into cryo sleep, and as the lights inside the pod went out they lost sight of his dozing figure. Allura set to fixing Keith’s arm then, so they could join the others in beginning to pick up the pieces outside.

“So you think it will take about two months to fix what she did?” Curtis heard Shiro ask.

He looked over at him and Kuro just in time to see Kuro let out a huff and throw the tablet in his hand back over his shoulder, where it bounced off an exam table and cracked before hitting the floor and breaking completely. He grabbed his medical bag from where Allura had left it after bringing it out of Sincline for him and stormed out of the medical bay without a word.

“Um, I don’t think now is the time to push his buttons,” Curtis advised. “He’s just a civilian, and he’s been through a lot.”

“I know,” Shiro sighed, running a hand through his dusty hair. “I’m nagging him, I shouldn’t be. My head’s just all over the place.”

He turned to look at the rest of them, at Curtis and Coran, and Sam and Matt standing farther back, straightening up in spite of being tired.

“The other pilot is in cryo too?” Shiro asked.

He was referring to the girl they’d pulled out of the mech. The very first thing Curtis had done when they’d dragged her onto the Atlas was put her into a cryo tube rather than trusting her not to use alchemy to escape the brig. Next to her was the young man that had been pulled out of the second mech.

Allura had taken Sincline into the quintessence field when the wave of destruction had happened, and pulled the second mech in with it. It wasn’t made of trans-reality metal and it didn’t protect against overexposure, he wasn’t dead when the girls had brought him back out but he was out cold and a bit sick. He was in a pod right next to the girl.

“They’re both locked down over there, yes,” Curtis answered. “And I think it’s best they stay that way until we figure out what to do with them.”

“We’re not doing anything with them,” Shiro answered, looking over to Allura. “They’re children. They were manipulated and turned into what they are, but they might still be young enough to be rehabilitated. We’re going to turn them over to their own people to decide if and how to do that.”

He paused, looking back over the group again and this time settling on Curtis and Coran.

“So, about the genius move to open not one, but two wormholes only a few miles above the surface of an inhabited planet.”

Curtis looked over at Coran, who looked back at him. He could tell they were both thinking the same thing.

“Coran actually did it,” Curtis said quickly.

“Curtis told me to,” Coran said just as fast.

“I’m not a physicist, I’ve never even seen a wormhole before this year,” Curtis defended. “Besides, I’m gay, I can’t do that kind of math.”

“And I’ve never even dreamed of putting two that close, there was really no way to know what was going to happen,” Coran said logically.

“And if you think about it, Sam and Matt were literally right there listening to us but didn’t stop us,” Curtis pointed out. “And I’m pretty sure you learn physics in engineering.”

“Wait, what?” Sam blinked in surprise.

“It’s all right, even the best of us make mistakes,” Coran patted Sam on the shoulder. “Just don’t do it again.”

“Hey, you know what? We’ve been here for a while,” Curtis noted, raising his wrist and pointing to his watch. Coran reached over and switched his hands so he was actually pointing to his timepiece, which was on the other wrist. They both backed toward the door. “We should go help see to the colonists.”

“They’ll be needing medical attention, and we should start arranging aid,” Coran agreed.

Curtis kicked open the door and they backed out into the hallway, making their escape while they could.

* * * * * * * * * *

Shiro watched Curtis and Coran disappear, too tired to even be angry at this point. And honestly, he wasn’t even certain if he was supposed to be angry. Without that gravitational wave as a source, the terraformer might not have had enough power to clear out so many ships so fast. Even if he’d thought to use the Infinite Zero, it wouldn’t have poured power into the device quickly enough to cause that kind of destruction. And it definitely wouldn’t have scared off Honerva.

He glanced over at Sam and Matt, and Matt immediately went on the defensive.

“Don’t look at me, I’m blaming Slav for everything,” he declared.

“Sure, okay,” Shiro ran a hand through his hair again. “Look, I’m not even writing this up. I don’t think there’s an “almost destroyed an inhabited solar system because math is a sexual dysfunction” checkbox on the report form. Just go see what you can do to help these people, I’ll join you shortly.”

Matt and Sam left, leaving him alone with Allura and Keith. Most of the Atlas staff were already outside establishing an emergency camp, including the staff from the infirmary. Shiro went over to join the other two, looking at Lance’s dim outline in the cryo pod.

“So, this thing saved our asses,” he finally said out loud what they were all thinking but hadn’t dared to speak yet. “I don’t know what to think about that.”

“Neither do I,” Allura admitted, letting the soft glow around her hands die down. She started moving Keith’s arm, testing the results of her healing. “It certainly waited until the eleventh hour.”

“I don’t think it wanted to come out at all,” Keith said, carefully bending his elbow. “Allura said when she was trying to get a read on it she couldn’t get past whatever walls it had up, right? And it didn’t make itself known until almost everyone was unconscious. It only came out when it had to.”

“So why save you?” Shiro asked. “Why not let Honerva take you out too, if it’s so shy?”

“Do you really want my guess?” Keith asked, looking up at him. “Because my guess makes no sense.”

“Your guess is as good as ours,” Allura said. “Might as well give it.”

“I think it was protecting Lotor,” Keith said with a shrug. “He and Kuro were down on the ground behind me. He was worn down from keeping up the barrier and he wasn’t getting up as fast as he would have otherwise. It wasn’t saving me, I was just the only thing between Honerva and them. It decided to catch her by surprise while she was focused on me.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” Shiro agreed.

“But maybe it does,” Allura frowned, letting go of Keith’s arm. She motioned for him to get up and do some stretches to see if he had full range of movement back. “Lance said he thinks he picked it up when he was getting into the Sincline, which was where Lotor was. It’s possible this particular entity was hanging around him for some reason. The question is just why.”

Shiro tried to look at the big picture, which was difficult with how tired and achy he was. Maybe it was possible that something from the other side was attracted to Lotor for some reason, but what would that be? It couldn’t be that he was part Altean, there were plenty of those who Lance had been in contact with over the last few weeks and it had done nothing to help any of those.

“He said the terraformer doesn’t work fully with his alignment,” Shiro remembered, looking at Allura. “What does that mean?”

“Lotor wants to be an Alchemist, but he doesn’t seem to be capable,” Allura answered. She crossed her arms and leaned back against an empty exam table. “Not because he lacks the skill or knowledge, he has both in great measure. But quintessence doesn’t respond to him the way it does to me, or to other Alteans. For him, it works more like Honerva’s magic.”

Shiro leaned against another table, absently biting his thumbnail. He wondered if he should tell them about the plateau, about that moment of clarity when it had seemed like something was telling him Honerva’s weak spot. Something that had spoken to him in a way similar to the Black Lion, and more recently Blue.

He decided that would wait. He was just too tired for that at the moment.

“Honerva gets her magic from those entities,” he said. “The way she heals so fast, the power it took to blast that outpost to pieces…she’s got to be tapping one of those things somehow. I don’t know what it’s getting in return, but it’s making her pretty much invincible. Others follow her, those druids that are serving her are just more of these void creatures in Altean skins. Is it possible that this one is attracted to Lotor the same way the others are attracted to Honerva?”

“Enough to protect him from her?” Allura asked. “I don’t know. That still doesn’t make sense, if it was defending him from Honerva why did it wait so long to act?”

“You’re talking about this thing like it’s some kind of animal,” Keith broke in. “It’s not. None of them are. They’re not mindless things being puppeteered by Honerva, her druids never have been. They talk, they reason. It knew Lotor could defend himself and it let him try to do it, it only stepped in when he was in immediate danger. It’s thinking and planning.”

“Lotor’s pretty weak against quintessence,” Shiro pointed out. “His addiction might make him easier to manipulate. Maybe it wants the same power Honerva wants and maybe it wants to beat her to it using Lotor.”

“So now instead of one threat to the entire universe, we potentially have two,” Allura sighed, looking up at Lance. “I need to get back to Earth as soon as possible, I have to consult my father’s journals and see if there’s anything in there that might help me get this thing out of Lance. It needs to be contained. But for now, I need to go see if I can help these people.”

“Sure.” Shiro stepped back and let her go, turning back to Keith. “You going to be okay?”

“Aren’t I always?” Keith asked.

“No. You’re just really good at hiding it.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll schedule an appointment with Dr. Fairhill when we get back,” Keith promised. “And I’ll make sure the rest of the team does too. When are you going to finally talk to her?”

“She’s a child psychologist, so never,” Shiro answered. “I’m just not ready to talk to anyone yet, Keith. I will, eventually, I promise. You should go check on Pidge and Hunk, see if there’s anything you can do to help.”

Keith pushed away from the exam table and headed out of the medical bay. Shiro went over to the healing pod where Adam lay, lightly resting a hand on the glass and looking past his own reflection to the sleeping face there.

There were circles under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept well in a very long time, and he probably hadn’t. Shiro remembered the hard metal floors of the prisoner blocks, the way one had to sleep very lightly and quickly become accustomed to waking at the slightest noise for his own safety. As eager as Shiro was to see Adam awake, what he’d said earlier was probably true; a few months in a forced sleep would probably do him a world of good.

He could see now that he had a moment of calm that Adam’s hair was also starting to turn. At his temples there was some silver, metallic strands that caught the light, because even under extreme stress Adam was too dignified to have his rich colors spoiled by a dull gray.

Overall, he did not look good. His sickness was evident in every feature, from his washed out skin to the chips and cracks in his nails. It really hit Shiro then that he had arrived in the final moments possible to save him, even a little bit longer and Adam might have been lying in a body bag in the Atlas morgue. Barely five minutes had probably been the difference between taking Adam home to heal and taking him home to bury him next to the rest of his unit.

“Shiro?”

He jumped, having thought he was alone, and looked down to find that Keith had returned.

“Sorry, I just wanted a minute,” he apologized, letting his hand fall away from the pod. “I’m coming.”

“No, it’s fine,” Keith came to stand next to him, looking down at Adam. “I just had something I wanted to talk to you about real quick, while I had you alone. Lance and I were talking about …our pasts. These cores Allura and Coran were talking about, from the original Paladins.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Shiro assured him. “I don’t think who you used to be is going to change who you are.”

“It’s not that,” Keith shook his head a little. “We were just talking and we were thinking that maybe, if all of us were pulled together to Blue at the same time, then maybe Melenor and Merla were too.”

“It’s a valid line of thought,” Shiro said carefully. “You sound like you’ve thought about it enough to have suspects.”

“Honestly? I think Veronica is the biggest candidate for Melenor,” Keith answered. “We know her family has Altean in their genes, and she’s the only other person in Lance’s family who came to the Garrison to join the military. She’s a fighter, and Melenor was a warrior queen.”

“Makes sense.”

“But I’m more worried about Merla.”

Shiro pulled his gaze away from Adam to look at Keith, raising an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because Lance remembers Altea,” Keith said. “And he remembers that Blaytz and Merla were really close. Like, married close. Lance and Veronica are brother and sister, so I don’t have any competition there, but Adam doesn’t have anyone who wouldn’t be an option if Merla turned up.”

It took Shiro a moment to digest that, and to understand what Keith was getting at. Once he did, he smiled tiredly.

“You’re worried now that everyone’s together “Merla” will show up and take Adam from me,” he deduced. “It’s okay, Keith. I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said uncertainly. “Griffin said Adam and Curtis are really close, and he’s really the only person she could be.”

“You think Curtis is secretly Adam’s millennia-old ex-wife?” Shiro asked, trying hard not to smile. “It’s not Curtis.”

“He’s the only one who fits,” Keith insisted. “Merla made those carvings around the Blue Lion, right? And she pinpointed the night you were going to crash. Lance and I think she saw that in the Quantum Abyss on their way to Earth, which means she had to be there the night your ship crashed. Curtis was there.

“And he was there on the bridge when the Atlas shifted,” he added. “He’s in the right age bracket, he was in the right place. The only other two people are you and Admiral Iverson…the Castle of Lions scanned you when we first arrived and didn’t pick up any Altean, and Iverson might be a bit too old. We should check Curtis’ DNA.”

“He’s not going to give you a DNA sample,” Shiro assured him. “Whether he admits it or not, I’m pretty sure he used to be special ops. Spies don’t willingly give up information about themselves.”

“Then we’ll just have to be sneakier.”

“Keith…listen to yourself,” Shiro sighed. “I appreciate your concern, I really do, but Curtis isn’t Merla.”

“Him being an idiot now doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been a brilliant alchemist in a previous life,” Keith pointed out.

He was so insistent, and on some levels Shiro found it touching. He really did appreciate that Keith worried so much about his feelings that he wanted to make sure nobody stood in the way of his potential happiness. It was sweet…if slightly childish. Not necessarily in a bad way, it just showcased how innocent and naive Keith’s thought processes could still sometimes be.

“…fine,” Shiro relented. “If you can find proof that Curtis is Merla, we’ll deal with it. But don’t do anything stupid, Keith, and try not to harass him too much. This is between you and me only, understand?”

“And Lance,” Keith answered.

“And Lance,” Shiro allowed. “This is between you and me and Lance only. Got it?”

“Got it,” Keith ran a finger over his heart in a cross gesture. “Okay, now I’m really going outside.”

Shiro let him go, shaking his head. Keith wasn’t going to find any proof that Curtis was Merla because there was no proof. He wasn’t, end of story. But if it kept him busy for a little while—and potentially punished Curtis for opening those damned wormholes—Shiro would let it happen.

Once he was alone, Shiro turned back to Adam’s healing pod. He thought back to the plateau, to the burning rage that had run through him when he’d laid eyes on Honerva standing over Adam’s limp form. All the blood, the way Adam hung unmoving in her hold, it hit him hard. The deja vu had been striking, the feeling of having been in that situation before had dredged up a few faint, incomplete memories.

_He was lying face down, his weapon just out of reach and the world burning around him. Honerva stood over him, holding him by the back of his armor, admiring her handiwork._

“I’m sorry,” Shiro said softly, knowing Adam couldn’t hear him. “For everything.”

_There was so much blood, and he wasn’t moving. His eyes were open but they didn’t see anything, they stared lifelessly into the distance. The others lay nearby, all of them caught unawares before being able to return to their Lions._

“It took you so long to finally trust me, and now you don’t anymore. You should believe you can count on us all to back you up. But you don’t, and I understand. And I’m sorry.”

_Warnings were being shouted, fighting was starting anew, but all she could focus on was the way he lay there at Honerva’s feet. Her own world was crumbling away with every second in a stark match to the planet around her, the image of her everything torn forcefully away was the only thing she could see._

“I just wish you weren’t so stubborn. I wish you could open up to more people and realize that not everyone is like your mother and me. Not everyone is going to leave you. Lance is here, Curtis is here, Matt is here. God, if you only knew how many students put flowers at the memorial on your birthday…there are people besides me who love you.”

_The anger hit all at once, a burning rage that wiped out all common sense. Everything she’d worked for, every moment of meditation and quiet contemplation meant to give her self control and stop her from following her sister’s example, it all vanished in that instant. In its place was a searing urge to hurt, to maim, to kill. She reached out with everything she had, dipped into the quiet sea of power that flowed throughout the universe, twisted the force meant to give life into one meant to take it. It was everything a true alchemist swore never to do, but sacred oaths meant nothing to her in this moment._

Shiro sighed, rubbing his temple lightly as he stepped away from the pod. He left the medical bay, turning down the lights as he went, and headed down the hallway to the elevator. Following Curtis around would keep Keith out of trouble for a bit, hopefully. But Shiro already knew he’d find nothing because he was looking in the wrong place.

_Someone trying to grab her, trying unsuccessfully to calm her down._

_“Merla, don’t! If you go down that path you might not come back!”_

There were bigger things to worry about though. Like the fact that they were looking at two months of Adam being out of commission, and the potential problem of his Lion not accepting anyone else much longer. She had let Shiro pilot her today, but he’d had enough trouble in the fight that he didn’t think he would be welcome anymore.

_“We have to get the Lions out of here. Orla, try to take Green. Denar, see if you an collect Yellow. Melenor, grab Blue.”_

_“But shouldn’t Merla—”_

_“I don’t think Blue will take her after what she did. Hurry, we have to go!”_

Allura had said Blue was the lover, the most accepting as long as the pilot had something they loved unconditionally. But Blue wasn't the angry warrior like Red, or the logical leader like Black. Shiro didn’t think her acceptance extended to those who had used dark magic to try and kill…even if it had been in a whole different lifetime.

* * * * * * * * * *

“Nothing,” Nadia declared, coming out of the last exam room with Ina. “Whatever they were doing, they weren’t doing it here.”

James looked around the upper basement medical lab, now fully lit with the life support systems running. It was mostly untouched, aside from the comings and goings of the druids nothing here had really been used.

“Curtis said he and that clone guy found two of them in Honerva’s shuttle,” James said, shouldering his rifle. “Same thing, dead bodies in a tube with some of those parasite things. They obviously don’t have a need for medical treatment, I’m guessing they just parked here at bedtime to try and slow the decay.”

“That would make sense,” Ina supposed. “Left to its own devices a humanoid body will fully decompose into skeletal remains within nine to twelve years. However, it will begin to liquefy within a month and essentially become useless as a vehicle unless steps are taken to prolong the process.”

“So they just popped themselves in the fridge at night to keep fresh?” Ryan asked, his eyebrows raising slightly. “Delightful.”

“Everything about these things is just a fairy princess fantasy come true,” James answered, making a face. He waved to the handful of Alteans standing by the door, some of them Hina’s guards and some of them a few of the vaguely healthy adults who had been freed from the mines. “Okay, it’s safe, go ahead and raid the place. The balmera crystal should be transferred soon, you’ll be able to load everybody into the bigger medical bay hopefully within the hour.”

He and the others stepped back out of the way, letting the Alteans flood in and start grabbing as much as they could to start treating the sick and wounded outside. Now that the Infinite Zero crystal was back in the Atlas, one of the three battleship class crystals it had been using was being transferred over to one of the grounded cruisers Lotor had drained the power from.

The colony was finished. Much of it was destroyed, and even if it wasn’t it was now known. Lotor intended to evacuate everyone on the cruiser, then collapse any surface traces of habitation so the Galra wouldn't think to look deeper and find the terraformer. The worst of the wounded would be taken to the medical facility in the Quantum Abyss, the rest would be taken to the relative safety of Earth’s system.

The MFE pilots were on their way back up to the surface, but when they reached the elevator it opened to reveal Acxa, with Lotor and three other Altean adults. She shoved them out of the way and practically ran down the hall, followed by Lotor. The three others were a little more apologetic, excusing themselves to get by and jogging after the other two.

“Where are they going in such a hurry?” Nadia wondered.

“Probably the lower basement,” James mused. “It was locked and could only be opened by Lotor or a gifted Altean. They think the younger kids might be down there.”

Curiously, he adjusted his rifle and went after them. The other three followed close behind him.

The hallway was long, and ended in another elevator. This one was much larger, meant to ferry bigger numbers of people up and down in an emergency. Lotor was putting his override into the console when the pilots caught up, and when the doors finally opened they stepped in with the Alteans without asking.

“Just being careful,” James lied when Lotor looked at him. “We don’t know if there are more of those druids down there.”

If them tagging along bothered Lotor, he didn’t show it. He was distracted, and so was Acxa. She was paying no attention whatsoever to anybody at all, watching the display change and moving to stand impatiently in front of the doors when they reached the bottom of the shaft. They opened too slowly for her liking, and she practically squeezed through them before the doors had fully parted. Lotor was out right after her, with the other Alteans following more slowly.

James stood back for a minute, keeping the other pilots with him, until everyone else had gone. They followed behind, so they wouldn’t get in the way, down the hall a few yards to where a metal door was. Lotor was putting in the override on this console as well.

James watched Acxa. She was growing more and more impatient by the second, and Lotor was well aware. Whatever she hoped to find down here, he knew about it and didn’t find her impatience to be out of place.

That was when it clicked. Why Acxa was so hellbent on getting into the colony, what would be worth risking her life for by playing Honerva and the Paladins against each other. What would make a person spend the last several years of their life neck-deep in a war she could have just walked away from, why she would stay in enemy territory when she had the whole universe open and nobody left she owed anything to.

James realized exactly what Acxa wanted here a split-second before the doors opened.

She was the first one through, hitting the panel on the wall to make the dim hall brighten with lights. The lower basement was the same as the upper, a grid of hallways and safe rooms and probably another medical bay and supply room. Acxa was off running and now so was Lotor, and the three remaining adults were close behind.

Nadia’s curiosity got the best of her and she took off after them. Ryan and Ina followed, not wanting to let her run off alone. James stayed back, walking much more slowly.

“Linelle?” He heard Acxa yelling up ahead, her voice echoing back as the group found the rooms that were sealed up. “Linelle!”

Before he even turned the corner to catch up he heard doors being thrown open, and Lotor’s voice as he called up on the comm to have more people sent down. When he reached them, the adults and Lotor were going in and out of rooms, checking on the wide-eyed occupants. They were about five or six to a room, none of them having reached their teens yet and some as young as toddlers.

Acxa was still throwing open doors as she went and calling out.

“Mom?” It sounded like a little girl. Acxa stopped where she was to listen. “Mom!”

She bolted down the hall, following the voice to a door about twenty yards down. When she reached it she had some trouble getting it open at first and James thought she might rip the door right off its hinges. When it finally did open a young, blue-haired Altean girl who looked about eight or nine stumbled out and threw herself into Acxa’s waiting arms, bursting into tears.

“Oh my God,” Nadia stood next to him, staring, her mouth hanging open. Ina and Ryan weren’t far off. “No freaking way.”

Acxa sank down to the floor, hugging the little girl close. Her face was turned away, but from the way she was shaking it wasn’t a stretch to assume she had started to cry. James turned away, less shocked than the others. After all, he had seen his own mother venture into a burning city to try and save his sister.

“Are you guys going to stand there and stare, or are you going to do your jobs?” He asked, adjusting the rifle over his shoulder again. “Come on, let’s help get these kids out of here.”

* * * * * * * * * *

It was three hours after the outburst in the medical bay when Curtis came across Kuro again. The doctor had very skillfully disappeared into the colony wreckage, and the dark of night was an excellent camouflage. Curtis actually only found him by accident, while doing a walk through for damage assessment.

Kuro was sitting on a pile of rock that had once been a wall. At his feet, two of the Atlas medical staff were zippering up a black body bag and preparing to take the newly deceased to the cruiser’s morgue.

Kuro was, to put it mildly, a disaster.

He was still covered in Adam’s blood, now thoroughly dried and flaking in some spots, smeared around his armor with dirt from fighting and dust from the colony rubble. His face and gloved hands were smeared with fresher blood, still wet from the last few hours of trying to help those who had been hurt in the fighting. His hair was a mess, his face was barely recognizable through the grime, and he was sitting, unmoving, with a blank, faraway stare. Even as he watched, Kuro’s eyelids were slowly drooping closed.

“Hey,” Curtis said softly, touching his shoulder very gently.

Kuro jumped as if he’d been electrocuted, immediately scrambling to his feet.

“I’m fine,” he declared, blinking wildly. “I”m awake, I’m good.”

“Calm down, it’s just me,” Curtis threw up both hands, hovering them in front of Kuro in case he fell as he rocked on his feet a bit unsteadily. “I was just checking on you.”

Kuro made a noise and sat back down heavily, rubbing his face with both hands. When they fell away and some of the mess was gone he could see how exhausted the poor guy was in the light of the hastily set up emergency lamps. He could also better see that some of the streaks in the dirt on his cheeks weren’t just from touching his face; at some point earlier he’d been crying.

“Oh, hey,” Curtis frowned, crouching down in front of him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just some bruises,” Kuro answered tiredly, closing his eyes and rubbing his temple in a way very similar to how Shiro often did it when he was tired. “I heal fast, it’s no big deal.”

“No, I mean are _you_ okay,” Curtis clarified. “After everything. The cruiser, the pat down, Honerva, this…mess.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” Kuro murmured, looking over as the medics lifted the body bag and started taking it away. “It’s really different working on a dead patient when they don’t start out that way.”

His eyes weren’t quite focused, and his voice sounded a little bit thick. Curtis frowned, looking at him a little closer.

“When was the last time you slept?”

“I’m not tired,” Kuro answered, reaching for his medical bag. When he started to stand back up again Curtis lightly blocked him from leaning forward.

“Kuro. When was the last time you slept?” He asked more insistently.

“Probably about…I don’t know. A couple days ago, maybe.”

“And when was the last time you ate anything?”

“I don’t know,” Kuro repeated. “What day is it?”

He pushed Curtis’ hand away and stood up, starting to pick his way away from the fallen building and out to the mostly clear path. But he was unsteady and slow, and he almost fell when he slipped on a patch of loose pebbles. Curtis rose and caught up to him as he regained his balance, lightly touching his arm. He didn’t want to grab Kuro or put his hands on him in a way he didn’t like, but he didn’t want him to end up face-down in the dirt either.

“I think you need a little break,” Curtis advised. “And to clean up a little bit.”

“I’m fine,” Kuro said again. It sounded almost like a mantra, like he’d been telling himself that for the last few hours.

“I’m sure you are,” Curtis allowed. “But everyone needs a break now and then.”

“There’s too much to do,” Kuro insisted, gesturing vaguely to the destruction as a whole. “Too many of these people are sick or hurt.”

“And the Atlas crew is on it,” Curtis answered, now moving to stand in front of him and stop him from walking. “There’s plenty of medical staff out here right now, Kuro. People who are well-rested and well-trained. Just come take a small break, before you start making mistakes.”

Curtis didn’t know how many days Kuro meant when he said a couple, but it was too long. Any adrenaline he’d been running on was long since gone, and fear could sap a person’s energy just as badly as exertion. Kuro had experienced both in spades over the last day, it was amazing he was still even standing.

After a moment, Kuro gave in. Curtis doubted it was because he was convincing, it was likely just that he was too tired to argue anymore. Curtis took his bag from him and put it over his own shoulder, then steered the other man through the colony to the Atlas.

It was bustling here, as soldiers and civilian staff alike continued to unload emergency provisions as they were needed, coming and going between it and the reclaimed cruiser that had been parked nearby. The cruiser’s lighting was a light blue now that it was being powered by a pure balmera crystal, making the black hull look sleek and neat instead of foreboding. A few hundred Alteans who were still healthy enough to be up and moving under their own power were helping with loading it up.

Curtis bypassed the loading ramps and took Kuro to the crew’s entrance, the smaller ramp toward the front of the ship where only authorized Atlas crew were allowed past by the guards. They stepped into the bright light of the ship and out of the relative dark, where Kuro looked even worse once he could really be seen.

They reached the elevator and Curtis steered Kuro inside, pausing when he heard some shouts from outside. He turned around just in time to see a furry gray and red body come bounding onto the ship, with one of the guards giving chase.

“It’s okay!” Curtis called, waving for the guard to back down. “It’s all right, she’s with us! He’s right here, Hoshi, he’s fine.”

She trotted down the hall to them and Curtis held the elevator for her, only letting it close once she was safely inside. Kuro sank down to his knees to hug her as they started going up, burying his face in her fur.

They should have gone back to the dignitary quarter, Curtis knew, to the room where Kuro had been put initially. It was safe enough for him to rest there, but there would also be more people coming and going as the colony leadership were offered rooms, those who would be landing on Earth with the Atlas to meet with Earth officials to ask for temporary asylum. It just wasn’t a good idea to bring a whole Galra cruiser into Earth’s atmosphere, even if it belonged to the Alteans now.

Curtis bypassed the dignitary quarter, instead going up farther to the officer’s quarter. It was restricted to the bridge crew and the Paladins, and to officers like Sam and the MFE pilots. When the doors slid open he helped Kuro to his feet and out into the empty hall.

Nobody was here, and nobody would be here for a while. They were all too busy helping outside.

The officers were still military personnel, so aside from Shiro they had a shared locker and shower room. Curtis took Kuro there, over to the men’s side where he turned on one of the showers to get the water warming before looking critically at his charge. Kuro looked dead on his feet.

“Uh…are you going to be able to get cleaned up without passing out?” He asked.

“The worst that could happen is I fall face down and drown in a shallow puddle,” Kuro answered tiredly, his eyes half-closed. “But if that happens then none of my problems are my problems anymore, so it’s still a win.”

“Okay, yeah, you definitely come from the same stock as Shiro,” Curtis shook his head as he left the shower area.

He went to his own locker, which he’d recently stocked once the Atlas had become ready to be called into action. He grabbed Kuro some toiletries and a towel, and laid them out on a bench near the showers along with his own clean workout uniform.

While Kuro washed away hours worth of mess, Curtis dampened another towel and used it to wipe down Hoshi, getting the dust out of her fur and cleaning the mud from her paws. He had to admit that she was a gorgeous animal, and just as smart as Kuro had repeatedly hinted she was. She sat patiently while he cleaned her up, lifting each paw obediently, and stayed calm when he found a hair dryer to get rid of the dampness leftover from her cleaning.

Curtis was just finishing up with her when Kuro came out of the shower area, looking clean but sleepy in the clothes that were just a little too big.

“Feel better?” Curtis asked, dropping the towels he’d used on Hoshi into the laundry chute. “You look better. I can finally actually see you again.”

“I feel a lot less disgusting,” Kuro admitted, scratching Hoshi behind the ear as she padded over to him. The water hadn’t woken him up much, he was still clearly out of it and his words were a bit slurred.

“Come on, you need to sit down for a little bit,” Curtis insisted.

He held out his hand, making sure Kuro saw it moving toward him and had time to avoid it if he chose, and gently took the other man by the wrist. A light tug was all it took to get him walking, and lead him out of the locker room and down the hall to Curtis’ own quarters.

They weren’t huge or luxurious, definitely a far cry from his bedroom at home, but they were everything a military officer needed. A bed, a desk, some drawers built into the wall, and an entertainment screen currently closed up behind a sliding door, all the basics. Curtis made Kuro sit on the edge of the bed and opened one of his desk drawers, were he had a box of granola bars he’d stashed there a few days ago.

“You might like these,” he told Kuro, offering him one. Kuro looked pathetic, his hair still dripping slightly as it hung down in his face. “Chocolate chip. I doubt you had chocolate in the Abyss.”

Kuro took it, but it was with such a lethargic motion that Curtis took it back and opened it for him, putting it back into his hands. He waited to make sure Kuro actually took a bite, then grabbed the towel he’d abandoned on the jacket hook by the door. He started to gently dry Kuro’s hair, finding it almost comical how limply Kuro sat just letting it happen. Like he’d just decided that his life had already become an out of control mess and he might as well accept this was a thing.

It wasn’t until Kuro’s hair was mostly dry, or at least until there wasn’t water running down his back anymore, that Curtis realized Kuro wasn’t moving. He was back to staring off into distance, completely still, as if all of his energy was being spent on just keeping his eyes open. Curtis waved a hand in front of his face, but got no response other than a very tired blink.

“Okay, you’re done,” Curtis decided, resting a hand on the back of Kuro’s head. He lightly leaned him forward, cupping the other hand under his mouth. “Spit it out before you choke.”

The chunk of granola bar that came out wasn’t even chewed, he’d just bitten it off and sat there with it in his mouth. Curtis grimaced and dumped the sticky mess into the small wastebasket in the corner, then returned to give him a light push.

Kuro fell backwards with a weak sound of protest, hitting the mattress with a single small bounce. By the time the vibration in the bed settled, he was unconscious. He didn’t move at all, didn’t even twitch an eyelid as Curtis lifted and repositioned him so his head was on the pillow, pulling the blanket out from under him and draping it over him.

“Here, come on, there’s room for you too,” Curtis told Hoshi, patting the bottom of the bed by Kuro’s legs. She jumped up and settled down there, resting her head on Kuro’s thigh to keep an eye on him while he slept. “Nobody else is going to come in here, you guys are safe.”

Curtis dimmed the lights as he left rather than turning them off, so Kuro wouldn’t wake in an unfamiliar place in the dark. He made a quick stop back in the locker room to clean up everything left behind and grab Kuro’s armor for cleaning, then headed back outside to join the rest of the crew.


	26. Epilogue - One Month Later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING - CANCER/ILLNESS - Section with trigger is marked, "[ [ T W ] ]".
> 
> Most of the following part, Intermezzo, can be read while avoiding this trigger. The overall story will not suffer. The sections containing this trigger will be similarly marked.
> 
> Part III: Intermezzo begins after this. There should be a link at the bottom to take you to the prologue of the next story...it's very short, just something for you all to bookmark or subscribe to so you don't miss future chapters. Thanks to everyone who's still reading!

_**One Month Later** _

####  _**[ [ T W ] ]** _

Curtis sat in the familiar waiting room, in one of the chairs in the middle of the lobby so he could tilt his head back far enough to put a magazine over his face and doze. He hated his doctor’s office and everything it symbolized, but the worst part of it was having to wait for everything.

She was a military doctor, so he would’ve thought she’d know just how important time was, but it wasn’t like there was really anybody he could complain to. Dr. Levine was one of a handful of special operations medics and she had too many decorations and too high of clearance to care if he whined.

And really, that’s all he would be doing. Whining. He hadn’t been here very long at all, he just didn’t like waiting.

“Commander Duchesne, you can come along into Dr. Levine’s office now.” Curtis lifted the magazine to find the receptionist leaning over him. “The lab finally got back to her with the test results.”

“Sure, thanks.”

He knew he didn’t sound very enthusiastic, but that was because he already knew the test results wouldn’t be any different than they were last time. He was a realist about his health, getting too hopeful only meant being let down later. He only bothered to still come to his appointments because his parents and sister would lose their minds if he didn’t.

He followed the young man down the hall, where he knocked on Dr. Levine’s office door and then opened it for him. Curtis thanked him and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

“I’m sorry about the wait, Curtis,” Dr. Levine said breathlessly. She was in the process of changing out of her tennis shoes and back into her office flats.

“Did you go over to the lab yourself?” Curtis asked as he pulled out a chair. “You have interns for a reason, Sarah.”

“But interns aren’t as threatening as I am,” Sarah pointed out, grabbing her lab coat from the hook and pulling it on over her neat pencil skirt. She looked at him unhappily as she adjusted the sleeves. “Do you want me to skip the usual small talk and just tell you what it says?”

“Please.”

They both sat down. Sarah sighed, taking the folder out of the envelope on her desk and opening it up, turning it around so he could see.

“It’s getting worse, but it’s getting worse slowly. Stage IV is a bad place to be in the first place, but that year without treatment really set you back.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a little hard to get cancer drugs during a Galra occupation,” Curtis answered, not bothering to read what was on the paper in front of him.

It was the same thing as every visit. Stage IV non-Hodgkin lymphoma, steadily progressing. Diagnosed only two months before the Galra invasion, aggressive chemotherapy was going to be needed. He’d been putting that off as long as possible, knowing that oftentimes the cure was worse than the cancer. Chemo was going to knock him out of life for a while, he was going to have to take medical leave. With how far he was progressing, he might even need to retire.

“You need to start stronger treatment,” Sarah seemed to read his mind, locking her fingers together and resting her chin in her hands to level a severe gaze at him. “Real treatment, Curtis. I understand that you spent the last six months trying to help rebuild, but you’re getting to the tipping point. Every day you put it off, your chances of remission get slimmer. I don’t think you understand where you are right now.”

“I understand perfectly,” Curtis disagreed. “I’ve just had things that were more important to deal with. We’re about to launch a small aid fleet to an isolated Altean colony, there were things to take care of.”

“Curtis,” Sarah sighed, reaching over and closing the folder in front of him. “I understand that you don’t feel sick. Sometimes people who are as far along as you just don’t feel it until it’s too late. You were extremely lucky that this was caught when it was. Just because you only feel a little tired when you get out of bed in the morning doesn’t mean you’re not very, very sick.

Curtis sighed and rubbed his face with both hands, wishing he were anywhere but here. He far preferred running away from this particular problem rather than facing it, but it didn’t appear he was going to be able to do that.

“Okay,” he said finally, dropping his hands. “Fine. I’ll start the chemo. Will I still be able to go to work?”

“Maybe,” Sarah answered, though she sounded evasive. “You’re going to be exhausted. You might be able to be on desk duty for a while, and knowing your stubbornness you may be able to get through a lot of it while still working. But you’re going to have to take medical leave eventually.”

“Fine,” Curtis repeated. “As long as I have time to make up a reason for leaving instead of just dropping off the face of the earth. What do you want me to do?”

“Let me go get some paperwork,” Sarah said, rising and heading out of the office. “We’ll go over your options and nail down a schedule, the sooner the better.”

The door closed behind her, leaving Curtis alone in the office. He sighed again and picked up a pen that lay on the desk, absently twirling it in his fingers and wishing, once again, that he was anywhere but here.

####  _**[ [ / T W ] ]** _

* * * * * * * * * *

“So this is it,” Allura declared, stepping into the containment room and flipping on the light.

She moved out of the way for Lotor, Shiro, Pidge, and Hunk to follow, all of them looking curiously at the row of five reinforced polymer cylinders hooked up to their pedestals. The electromagnetic fields produced by the machinery kept the things floating within the glass contained; five strange, cloud-like creatures that flitted around through the vacuums they occupied.

Everyone had just come from the Garrison medical bay, where Lance had been awakened from cryosleep about half an hour prior. Aside from being a bit sleepy, he seemed fine. He was currently in the cafeteria with Romelle and Veronica, getting some food into him.

“It took me a bit, but Lotor actually had some of Honerva’s old writings that described these creatures a bit more,” Allura told them, crossing her arms to look over their specimens. “I was able to use that information to remove them from their hosts. The two on either end were taken from the girl Lance found and three children we found in the lower basement. They were all asleep in healing pods and essentially being used as incubators. The one in the middle there was taken from Lance.”

“The middle one seems a lot bigger,” Pidge noted, keeping her distance. “And it’s a different color. It looks kind of metallic.”

“It does,” Shiro agreed. “But I guess the question is, are they completely different entities, or do they just change as they age and get bigger?”

“They’re definitely different,” Allura answered. “They feel different, I can’t explain it. They act differently as well. The four taken from the children put up quite a fight, the one taken from Lance didn’t.”

She turned her eyes to the cylinders, to where the four smaller, black creatures were flitting around in their confinement. They darted around almost angrily, occasionally hitting the polymer surface with a loud thunk only to retreat as soon as the pulse running through it repelled them. In contrast, the larger one floated calmly and almost indifferently, delicately swirling as it moved slowly up and down.

“They’re different from the Sincline entities as well,” Allura added. “And from the Lions. The quintessence field seems to have a whole diverse ecosystem of its own, not everything that comes out of it is the same. What I can definitely tell you, though, is that all five of these are hostile.”

“Even the one that’s not pitching a fit?” Shiro asked.

“Yes. It didn’t give me much of a fight when I removed it, but it tried to give me a very nasty feedback in the process. It doesn’t like us. Well, it doesn’t like me.”

“What she means is, it reacts more positively to me,” Lotor said.

To illustrate, he moved closer to the cylinders and reached up to put his hand near the middle one, just shy of touching it. The creature inside floated lazily over to where his hand was, not touching the polymer itself but spinning in a way that made the light reflect off of it very prettily.

Allura stepped forward as Lotor lowered his hand and put hers in its place. Immediately the entity’s form grew more solid, sharper and more threatening, before it dissipated completely and reappeared at the top of the cylinder where she couldn’t reach.

“The smaller creatures don’t like it either,” Allura continued, stepping away. “Right now they’re more irate at us being here than anything, but when nobody’s in here you can see on camera that they all react negatively in the direction of the larger one. This is definitely what “pissed them off” as Lance said.”

“So we have warring creatures from the quintessence field that have spilled over into our reality,” Hunk frowned. “But if the one that was in Lance is so powerful, why did it just give in and let itself be removed?”

“Because it didn’t want to be there,” Lotor answered. “Come.”

They left the room an went down the hall to Allura’s lab, where Allura locked the door behind her while Lotor booted up her computer. He took a small flash drive device out of his glove and plugged it in before pulling Allura’s own records up from her hard drive.

“Princess,” he motioned for her to go first.

It had been a month, but he was still distantly polite. Allura couldn’t really blame him, she was also using the chaos of preparing to rescue Colony Two as a reason to dance around their need to have a conversation. Time alone was often awkward, borderline uncomfortable, and they had both spent a month doing a lot of blushing and stuttering.

She almost dreaded the moment when everyone was safe and sound and there were no more distractions to hide behind.

“The children we removed the smaller entities from were lethargic and exhausted,” she said, stepping forward. “They were wasting away, slowly. But not just physically, a skilled alchemist can tell by trying to read them that their cores were also partially eaten away. With enough time they’ll recover, and since rift creatures have been known to go after a person’s life essence it’s not strange that this would happen.

“But the physical damage, that is odd. Rift creatures suck the life out of things, they drain them until they’re empty and the person simply dies because of it. Quintessence is life, a person’s essence is what animates their body.”

She picked up one of the journals from a shelf and opened it, laying it out on the counter even though she knew the others couldn’t read it.

“These are Honerva’s notes, not my father’s,” she told them. “Honerva discovered that a person’s body becomes attuned to their core over time, consuming it means the body grows sick and eventually dies without it even if you replace it. So those druids she was making could only take a temporary body at best, once they drained the life force from them the body was going to die no matter what. They couldn’t just replace it and keep going indefinitely.”

“Wait,” Pidge sat up straighter on the stool she’d settled on, looking between Allura and Shiro. “If a specific body is linked to its specific soul—core, whatever—how did you put Shiro into a body that wasn’t actually his without anything bad happening?”

“That…is where the very bad news comes in,” Allura answered. “Lotor?”

Lotor turned back to the computer, now accessing files on the small drive he’d connected. Allura didn’t have to look at the screen to know that what was now coming up was the information he had taken from the Kuron Project.

“Shiro’s clones were Honerva’s breakthrough,” Lotor explained. “As long as there’s a certain amount of human DNA, the resulting person will always appear human. This is why Keith’s Galra heritage was initially hidden, and why neither Pidge nor Hunk display anything but human traits in spite of having mixed ancestry. Honerva was able to mass produce them because the human DNA provided a stable outer shape for everything else she wanted to put in there.

“But it wasn’t just her choice of subjects that was significant. It was also the location of her lab.”

He pulled up a map of the system where Honerva’s clone lab had been, centering it in on the desolate planet with its rocky moon.

“Honerva created her clones on a moon,” Lotor pointed out. “Not a planet. And not a normal moon either, this is actually an asteroid she personally pulled into orbit rather than a naturally occurring satellite. She went to great pains to create a large number of clones as far from a naturally occurring quintessence pool as possible.”

“They don’t have cores,” Shiro realized, his eyes widening. “They’re empty shells.”

“Exactly,” Lotor confirmed, pulling up the file on the Kuron clones. “As you’ve seen with Kuro, they were built to be fast, strong, and extremely intelligent, but not to have autonomous thought. They have muscle power and processing power, but they’re not actually…alive. I suspect the only reason Kuro is an individual in his own right is because he was kept at Central Command for so long. Although it's out in space it's become an unnatural planetary body of its own, with its own quintessence pool. Exposure to it likely allowed Kuro to develop his own core.”

“So Shiro’s core could be put into the clone’s body because it was empty and not already linked to any kind of quintessence?” Pidge asked.

“Correct,” Lotor answered. “And it gets slightly worse. During the last six months, since your friend Adam fell into her research, she’s now acquired the DNA of highly evolved predators that before now were considered extinct. She no longer has him to actively take DNA from, but she likely still has his print in her system and will be able to replicate it. It will take longer, but it can be done.”

“So the blood sample she took from me back on Colony One…” Shiro said, looking a little bit pale.

“We initially destroyed the Kuron Project information she had,” Lotor said. “It’s also now been wiped out of the databases in the Abyss, the only copy is on this drive. We were going to destroy that as well once we’d studied it, to keep it from falling into her hands, but now she has everything we took in a little vial she took from you.”

“She’s going to restart the project,” Allura said confidently. There was no question about it, especially now that they had discovered a very important piece of information. “And it gets a little bit worse than even that.”

“Worse than that,” Hunk repeated, looking like he wanted to be ill. “How does it get worse than that?”

Allura looked to Lotor, who nodded slightly. The floor was hers.

“There’s only one reason to make an army of indestructible physical bodies with nothing inside to animate them, and that’s if you already have something else to fill them with,” Allura said darkly. “We believe she’s not making an army of clones to do her bidding. She’s making an army of vessels for rift creatures to permanently inhabit without having to worry about decay.”

Allura looked at the others, to be sure they understood what she was saying. From the looks of horror painting their faces, she’d made herself clear.

“She’s going to bring a legion of these things into our reality, and she’s going to turn them lose in super soldier bodies so they can feed on a life-filled universe without being stopped.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Kuro sat cross-legged on his bed, tucked away quietly in his quarters on the Lorelia. The room was very small since it wasn’t exactly a huge ship, but it gave him a place to stay and he had access to the now unused common room to make himself a little lab. It was all right.

It wasn’t the facility, of course, but that place didn’t belong to him. He had only been a guest there, and now that it was needed he had to get out of the way. That left him…here. Floating out in the middle. Kuro wasn’t a citizen of Earth and any protections that humans enjoyed didn’t extend to him, that had been made clear to him by Admiral Iverson.

Admiral Iverson seemed like a nice man, at least. He had been the one to make sure Kuro knew where he stood so he didn’t get into any trouble. Their Secretary of Defense could decide he was a threat and demand he be taken into custody at any time, so while diplomatic immunity was being worked out he had been warned to stay on the ship.

The Lorelia currently acted as an Altean consulate. It was landed outside of town, near the Galaxy Garrison base, and as a foreign dignitary Lotor had been given the blessings of the government to have it considered Altean soil for the time being. So Kuro was safe as long as he didn’t leave the ship.

He was considered a human—and therefore citizen of Earth—by pretty much all of the Alteans. Which he couldn’t blame them for, they were very afraid of outsiders and for good reason. And he was considered an Altean citizen by Earth, since he hadn’t been born on this planet and was technically alien.

Kuro was basically without a home. Takashi and Curtis wanted him to apply for citizenship, but first the government had to figure out how an alien did that. Apparently they didn’t exactly have a ton of humans born on other planets coming here. Go figure.

He also had the fact that he’d beaten the snot out of six Earth military service members being held against him, which he felt was very rude since they had started the whole thing.

The computer made a beeping sound to alert him that his program was done. He dropped the funny little colored cube he’d been playing with and carefully stepped over Hoshi, picking up the little gold circlet and disconnecting it from the machine.

The program had been running for four days now, so he hoped it had worked. It had been calculating the time between Takashi’s birth and the time he had become Honerva’s lab rat, converting the Earth units into standard universal ones and measuring against the data on the circlet.

Basically, he had been trying to program it to only give him back memories that were his, and to leave Takashi’s out.

He made sure his door was locked, glancing at the clock as he climbed back over Hoshi to the bed. It was night here, and the only other people on this ship were three Altean diplomats who ignored and avoided him anyway. He wasn’t going to be bothered.

“Here goes nothing I guess,” he murmured, tensing as he set the circlet on his head. He took a deep breath and activated it.

Kuro had known going into it that this was going to hurt. The brain was a delicate piece of machinery, messing with it caused a lot of sensory feedback. The pain was sharp and immediate, behind his eyes and running through his skull to the point where he was sure he could feel it in his teeth. The only saving grace was that instead of downloading a whole lifetime of memory he was working with the span of only a year or two.

When the pain stopped, it left him breathless. He ripped the circlet off his head and threw it across the room, holding his head and leaning forward until he was practically folded in half.

“Oh my GOD it’s like extended brain freeze turned up to eleven,” he hissed, rubbing his head as if he could massage his brain through his skull. “I hate this stupid body sometimes.”

He waited for the ache to dissipate, which it did surprisingly fast once pure energy wasn’t being forced through his head, and sat up straight. He took another deep breath and opened his eyes, mentally taking stock of himself.

“Oh.”

He remembered. He remembered quite a bit.

“ _Oh_.”

He scrambled off the bed, tripping over Hoshi this time and eliciting an annoyed yelp as he threw himself across the small room to pull open the little closet. He opened the door all the way so he could look in the mirror there, leaning in close.

Kuro blinked, making the soft gray irises disappear. Instead the human eyes were replaced with an inky black surface. He leaned back, raising up his hands and flicking his fingers. Familiar claws extended, transparent curves of razor sharp purple energy, leaving a deep gouge in the mirror as he ran one lightly down the edge of it. He flicked his fingers again, retracting them and turning to look down at Hoshi.

“You knew this the whole time?” He prompted.

Hoshi gave a lazy yawn, rolling over to face away from him.

“Of course you did,” Kuro huffed, hands on his hips. He blinked again, once again hiding the natural blackness away behind soft, innocent gray.

That was, of course, what he had meant when he’d written to himself to say that people would die if he left the Abyss. Quintessence was rife there, it was everywhere, he absorbed it simply by being there. Here, though, far from a natural source, he was eventually going to have to start siphoning it out of the living things around him to survive.

“You know, I really should have just locked the door and pretended not to be home when Lotor showed up,” Kuro sighed, rubbing his temple in frustration. “Okay, think logically.”

He tried to start pacing the tiny room, only to immediately trip over Hoshi again. Instead, he perched on the edge of the bed, biting his thumbnail.

“This won’t be so bad. I can handle this,” he mused out loud. “I just have to find a way to feed while making sure none of the food realizes I’m here. And stay away from the alchemists. And somehow figure out a way to get off this planet by myself before I’m caught. That’s only three things.”

Only three difficult, nearly impossible things. Kuro groaned, falling back on the bed and covering his face with his hands again.

“This is a very inconvenient place to remember what I am.”


End file.
